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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

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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
Back
Favourite
Sometimes
Occupation
Heart
Practicals
Years
Practical
Life
Pursuit
Broken
Lasts
Last
Fingernails

More quotes by Vita Sackville-West

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I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.
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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?
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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
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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
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how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!
Vita Sackville-West
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There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding...
Vita Sackville-West
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all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
Vita Sackville-West
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See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.
Vita Sackville-West
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The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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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
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Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.
Vita Sackville-West
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[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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Flowers really do intoxicate me.
Vita Sackville-West
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Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.
Vita Sackville-West
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Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Vita Sackville-West