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.
Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.
A man and his tools make a man and his trade.
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.
a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality.
One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.
Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.
however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.
[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!
travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen ...
The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.