VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.

What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.

Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

There are no signposts in the sea.

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.

Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.

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.

Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.

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

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

Not seeing is half-believing.

The wise traveler is he who is perpetually surprised.

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.

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.

April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.

I cannot abide the Mr. and Mrs. Noah attitude towards marriage; the animals went in two by two, forever stuck together with glue.

I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.

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.

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.

To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone.

It isn't that I don't like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.