Quotes from Vita Sackville-West

Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.

Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

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.

For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was 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.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.

Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.

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

April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.

There are no signposts in the sea.

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.

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.

Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life.

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.