“I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.”
Vita Sackville-West“I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.”
Vita Sackville-West“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.”
Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf“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]”
Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”
Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf“...How I adore you and want you. You can't know how much...I love belonging to you-- I glory in it, that you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, and made me yours, so that away from you I am nothing but a useless puppet, an empty husk.”
Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921“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.”
Vita Sackville-West“What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.”
Vita Sackville-West“Ambition old as mankind the immemorial weakness of the strong.”
Vita Sackville-West“Not seeing is half-believing.”
Vita Sackville-West“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.”
Vita Sackville-West