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
All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West
travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen ...
Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.
I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.
Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.
To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,
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?
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
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.
Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.