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.”

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

“She found herself suddenly surrounded by a host of assumptions. It was assumed that she trembled for joy in his presence, languished in his absence, existed solely (but humbly) for the furtherance of his ambitions, and thought him the most remarkable man alive, as she herself was the most favoured of women, a belief in which everybody was fondly prepared to indulge her. Such was the unanimity of these assumptions that she was almost persuaded into believing them true.”

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

“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.”

“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”

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

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

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

“There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.”

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

“I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]”

“There are no signposts in the sea.”

“My dear Mr FitzGeorge!' cried Lady Slane. 'You really mustn't talk as though my life had been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to complain of - nothing.''Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered. Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift. You know that as well as I do. Frustrated, he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape. All meaning goes out of life, and life becomes existence - a makeshift. Face it, Lady Slane. Your children, your husband, your splendour, were nothing but obstacles that kept you from yourself. They were what you chose to substitute for your real vocation. You were too young, I suppose, to know any better, but when you chose that life you sinned against the light.”

“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.”

“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”

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

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