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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?

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
Writing
Butterfly
Indeed
Necessary
Days
Moment
Write
Clap
Moments
Slip
Else
Slips

More quotes by Vita Sackville-West

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Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.
Vita Sackville-West
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Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.
Vita Sackville-West
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For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite de rigueur ... Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career.
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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The true solitary ... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others he will feel that time spent in company is time lost he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.
Vita Sackville-West
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I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.
Vita Sackville-West
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Not seeing is half-believing.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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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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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.
Vita Sackville-West
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My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.
Vita Sackville-West
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Flowers really do intoxicate me.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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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's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding...
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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There are no signposts in the sea.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.
Vita Sackville-West
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that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!
Vita Sackville-West