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Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
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
Ambition
Weakness
Mankind
Strong
Immemorial
More quotes by Vita Sackville-West
[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
Vita Sackville-West
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
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
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
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
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
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
One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.
Vita Sackville-West
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
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
Flowers really do intoxicate me.
Vita Sackville-West
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
There are no signposts in the sea.
Vita Sackville-West
For bees are captious folk / And quick to turn against the lubber's touch.
Vita Sackville-West
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
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
It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
Vita Sackville-West
Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.
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 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
