The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West (1892–1962,) Lady Nicolson, CH, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by Vita Sackville-West
Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Freedom
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. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Beauty
Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Weakness
Summer makes a silence after spring.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Summer
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Country
Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man’s life.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Life
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Gardening
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
Topics: Travel, Tourism
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Gardening
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before
—Vita Sackville-West
Topics: Gardening
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Virginia Woolf English Novelist
E. M. Forster English Novelist
William Shenstone English Poet
Eliza Cook English Author
Aleister Crowley English Occultist
Anne Bradstreet American Poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning English Poet
Letitia Elizabeth Landon English Poet, Novelist
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu English Aristocrat, Poet
Christina Rossetti English Poet