Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer. A successful and prolific novelist, poet, and journalist during her lifetime—she was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems—today she is chiefly remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst she created with her diplomat husband, Sir Harold Nicolson. She is also remembered as the inspiration for...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 March 1892
To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,
Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.
There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.
The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.