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
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.
Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
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?
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.
Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme,
See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go ...
There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding ...
how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!
all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.
For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch ...