124 Quotes by Vita Sackville-West

Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

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 myselfAnd 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 timeTo get myself back to myself when they have gone.

And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.

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? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree

There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.

She found herself suddenly surrounded by a host of assumptions. It was assumed that she trembled for joy in his presence, languished in his absence, existed solely (but humbly) for the furtherance of his ambitions, and thought him the most remarkable man alive, as she herself was the most favoured of women, a belief in which everybody was fondly prepared to indulge her. Such was the unanimity of these assumptions that she was almost persuaded into believing them true.