124 Quotes by Vita Sackville-West

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.