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how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!

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
Disheartening
Compared
Poor
Hope
Experience
Thing

More quotes by 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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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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I miss you even more than I could have believed and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
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?
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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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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[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
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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April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.
Vita Sackville-West
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I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.
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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There's no beginning to the farmer's year, / Only recurrent patterns on a scroll / Unwinding...
Vita Sackville-West
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however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.
Vita Sackville-West
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It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
Vita Sackville-West
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Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
Vita Sackville-West
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Growth is exciting growth is dynamic and alarming.
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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Tools have their own integrity.
Vita Sackville-West
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Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.
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