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
travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen ...
The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.
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.
Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.
How subtle is the relationship between the traveler and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents ... and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same.
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!