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Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.
Vita Sackville-West
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Vita Sackville-West
Age: 70 †
Born: 1892
Born: March 9
Died: 1962
Died: June 2
Author
Biographer
Gardener
Horticulturist
Poet
Writer
Knole House
Knole
Lady Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West
Lady Nicolson
Victoria Sackville-West
Victoria Mary Sackville-West
V. Sackville-West
Failing
Safer
Probably
Modest
Rather
Ambitious
Hate
Latter
Better
Extremely
Would
Safety
Fail
Succeed
Gloriously
More quotes by Vita Sackville-West
I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.
Vita Sackville-West
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.
Vita Sackville-West
Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.
Vita Sackville-West
My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.
Vita Sackville-West
Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.
Vita Sackville-West
But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.
Vita Sackville-West
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.
Vita Sackville-West
Everywhere bees go racing with the hours, / For every bee becomes a drunken lover, / Standing upon his head to sup the flowers.
Vita Sackville-West
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.
Vita Sackville-West
A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.
Vita Sackville-West
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.
Vita Sackville-West
I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.
Vita Sackville-West
How subtle is the relationship between the traveler and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents ... and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought had known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same.
Vita Sackville-West
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
Vita Sackville-West
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.
Vita Sackville-West
I like muddling things up and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.
Vita Sackville-West
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
Vita Sackville-West
It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.
Vita Sackville-West
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.
Vita Sackville-West
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
