Quotes by Vita Sackville-West

Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life. . . . Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.

Summer makes a silence after spring.

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. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

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

The country habit has me by the heart, For he's bewitched forever who has seen, Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun.

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.

It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.