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I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.

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
Live
Renewed
Country
Eternally
Really
Suppose
Life
Determination
Evidence
Lies
Pleasure
Lying
Evidences

More quotes by Vita Sackville-West

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The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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Not seeing is half-believing.
Vita Sackville-West
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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
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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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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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It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.
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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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
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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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Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn't care deeply.
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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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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All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.
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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For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.
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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There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.
Vita Sackville-West
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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.
Vita Sackville-West
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Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
Vita Sackville-West