Vita Sackville West Love Quotes

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

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 am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But 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.

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.

With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...

...How I adore you and want you. You can't know how much...I love belonging to you-- I glory in it, that you alone have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, and made me yours, so that away from you I am nothing but a useless puppet, an empty husk.

Someday I’ll write and tell you all the things you mean to me in my mind. Shall I?

I've just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. It's perfectly peaceful here--they're playing bowls--I'd just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say-- except that I love you and I've got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest-- let me have a line... You have given me such happiness...

Virginia wasn’t all cool intellect by any means. She had the warmest and deepest and most human of affections for those she loved. They were few, perhaps, and she applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.

We could never have hit it off for long. There was never anything but love to keep us together.

She loves in a way that will make her suffer horribly.

I am absolutely devoted to her, but not in love. So there.

I think I won't come on Thursday for this reason; I must get on with writing; you would seduce me completely [...]

Yes, dearest Vita: I do miss you; I think of you: I have a million things, not so much to say, as to sink into you.

We owned a garden on a hill, We planted rose and daffodil, Flowers that English poets sing, And hoped for glory in the Spring. We planted yellow hollyhocks, And humble sweetly-smelling stocks, And columbine for carnival, And dreamt of Summer's festival. And Autumn not to be outdone As heiress of the summer sun, Should doubly wreathe her tawny head With poppies and with creepers red. We waited then for all to grow, We planted wallflowers in a row. And lavender and borage blue, - Alas! we waited, I and you, But love was all that ever grew.

She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything … How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one so infinitely more compassionate than her own?

I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind – stamping out the hops in a great vat in Kent – stark naked, brown as a satyr, and very beautiful. Don't tell me this is all illusion [...]

I cannot love your weeping poets...

After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

Tomorrow I dine with my darling Mrs Woolf at Richmond [...] I love Mrs Woolf with a sick passion. So will you. In fact I don't think I will let you know her.

I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again, – even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.

All love is a weakness, if it comes to that, in so far as it destroys some part of our independence.

Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever.

Somehow it's dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don't believe it, you're a long-eared owl and ass. Lovely phrases?

You angel, you have written. [...] Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude. You see that I am extremely sentimental. Had you suspected that?

No, I am in no muddles [...] Virginia – not a muddle exactly; she is a busy and sensible woman. But she does love me, and I did sleep with her at Rodmell. That does not constitute a muddle though.

You see it is so easy for you sitting in Tavistock Square to look inward; but I find it very difficult to look inward when I am also looking at the coast of Sinai; and very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.

This is how you must imagine your letters arriving, and me carrying them off to read in peace, and saying 'oh darling Virginia', and smiling to myself, and reading them all over again. Whereas mine just come with the postman.

Vita comes to lunch tomorrow, which will be a great amusement and pleasure. I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in love' with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this 'love'?

Lunched with Virginia in Tavistock Square, where she has just arrived. The first time that I have been alone with her for long. Went on to see Mama, my head swimming with Virginia.

I find life altogether intoxicating, – its pain no less than its pleasure, – in which Virginia plays no mean part.

Remembrance clamoured in him: 'She was wild and free, Magnificent in giving; she was blind To gain or loss, and, loving, loved but me, — but me!

Suddenly the word instinct leaves me.

Yes, I miss you, I miss you. I dare not expatiate, because you will say I am not stark, and cannot feel the things dumb people feel. You know that is rather rotten rot, my dear Vita. After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain – which is I've no doubt the first stage of intimacy – no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much [...] But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.

but no one except a cad likes to reflect that he has been loved more than he has loved. It produces an uneasy though quite unreasonable sense of guilt. So Sebastian went himself to fetch his hat.

The only time I thought of Virginia as being eclipsed was when the sun himself shared her darkening and I saw her standing wraithlike on a Yorkshire moor while the shadow swept onwards towards totality

Clive follows me all over the place. Have I been to bed with Virginia yet? If not, am I likely to do so in the near future? If not, will I please give it my attention? As it is high time Virginia fell in love.

Chances of meeting this person, doing that thing, accumulate. Life is as I’ve said since I was ten, awfully interesting – if anything, quicker, keener at forty-four than twenty-four – more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara – my new vision of death. ‘The one experience I shall never describe’ I said to Vita yesterday.

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.

[Virginia] is an exquisite companion, and I love her dearly. She has to stay in bed till luncheon, as she is still far from well, and she has lots of lessons to do. Leonard is coming on Saturday [...] Please don't think that a) I shall fall in love with Virginia b) Virginia will fall in love with me c) Leonard """""" d) I shall fall """ Leonard Because it is not so [...]

He was a foolish cynic who said that great love occurred only two or three times in a century. 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. Surviving all vicissitudes, and rich with its manifold branches, every leaf holding its own significance.

Henry by the compulsion of love had cheated her of her chosen life, yet he had given her another life, an ample life, a life in touch with the greater world, if that took her fancy; or a life, alternatively, pressed close up against her own nursery. For a life of her own, he had substituted his life with its interests, or the lives of her children with their potentialities. He assumed that she might sink herself in either, if not both, with equal joy. It had never occurred to him that she might prefer simply to be herself.

I like her being honourable, and she is it; a perfect lady, with all the dash and courage of the aristocracy, and less of its childishness than I expected. She is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanwhile, she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt, and though embarrassing at breakfast, has a manly good sense and simplicity about her which both L. and I find satisfactory. Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; and suppose if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort.

Do you know it was four weeks yesterday that you went? Yes, I often think of you, instead of my novel; I want to take you over the water meadows in the summer on foot, I have thought of many million things to tell you. Devil that you are, to vanish to Persia and leave me here! [...] And, dearest Vita, we are having two water-closets made, one paid for by Mrs Dalloway, the other by The Common Reader: both dedicated to you.

Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you'll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody.

I wish I had a photograph of you. (Has mine ever turned up?) It is a torment not being able to visualise when one wants to. I can visualise you as a matter of fact surprisingly well, – but always as you stood on your door-step that last evening, when the lamps were lit and the trees misty, and I drove away.

Nothing and no one in the world could kill the love I have for you. I have surrendered my whole individuality, the very essence of my being to you. I have given you my body time after time to treat as you pleased. All the hoardings of my imagination I have laid bare to you. There isn't a recess in my brain into which you haven't penetrated. I have clung to you and caressed you and slept with you and I would like to tell the whole world that I clamour for you. You are my lover and I am your mistress, and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination-- the most powerful in the world.

I have discovered my true function in life: I am a snob.

Vita has been twice. She is doomed to go to Persia; and I mind the thought so much (thinking to lose sight of her for five years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her.

The second act of Tristan is no fit fare for a young man unhappily in love.

Clive with his tongue well-loosened, imagine my horror when he suddenly said, 'I wonder if I dare ask Vita a very indiscreet question?' and I, being innocent and off my guard, said yes he might, and he came out with 'Have you ever gone to bed with Virginia?' but I think my 'NEVER!' convinced him and everybody else of the truth. This will show you what the conversation was like!

And then, I don’t believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit. Long Barn, Knole, Richmond, and Bloomsbury. All too familiar and entrapping. Either I am at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, and I am strange; so neither is the real essential person, and confusion results. But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros, we should both be equally strange and equally real. On the whole, I think you had much better make up your mind to take a holiday and come.

What I should really like to do would be to take you to some absurdly romantic place, ― vain dream, alas! What with Leonard and the Press ― Besides, by romantic I mean Persia or China, not Tintagel or Kergarnec. Oh what fun it would be, and Virginia's eyes would grow rounder and rounder, and presently it would all flow like water from a Sparklets siphon, turned into beautiful bubbles.

I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality. [...] Mrs. Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there is no outward adornments -- she dresses quite atrociously. At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. She was smarter last night; that is to say, the woolen orange stockings were replaced by yellow silk ones, but she still wore the pumps. She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well. She is quite old. I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she's asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.

All these ancestors and centuries, and silver and gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, and has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection. So many rare and curious objects hit one's brain like pellets which perhaps unfold later. But it's the breeding of Vita's that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her and Knole in my eye [...]

I am sitting up in bed: I am very very charming; and Vita is a dear old rough coated sheep dog: or alternatively, hung with grapes, pink with pearls, lustrous, candle lit, in the door of a Sevenoaks draper [...] Ah, but I like being with Vita.

But 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 defenses. And I don't really resent it.

I don't want to get landed in an affair which might get beyond my control before I knew where I was. [...] But darling, Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that's all. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven't shocked you [...]

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.

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.

If one wanted beauty, one had only to rest one's eyes on her, so fine and old and lovely, like an ivory carving; flowing down like water into her chair, so slight and supple were her limbs, the firelight casting a flush of rose over her features and snowy hair. Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page. Youth could never sit as still as that, in absolute repose, as though all haste, all movement, were over and done with, and nothing left but waiting and acquiescence.

write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross; that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written.

Leonard Woolf’s endurance of Virginia’s famous frigidity is, we must suppose after the fact, altogether to his credit. Their honeymoon did not bring the amelioration they had hoped for and it is incredibly innocent and moving to think of them discussing it with Vanessa. They wanted to know when she had first had an orgasm. She said she couldn’t remember but she knew she had been “sympathetic” from the age of two. Vita Sackville-West said about Virginia, “She dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity.

ON 26 July 1926, Vita Sackville-West gave the Woolfs a cocker spaniel puppy which they named Pinka (or Pinker). She ate holes in Virginia’s skirt and devoured Leonard’s proofs. “But”, writes Virginia, “she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day”. For nine years Pinka was the much loved companion of both Leonard and Virginia, though in time she became essentially Leonard’s dog. Loved as she was, the pattern of her life naturally became woven into the pattern of theirs. The daily habits; her walk with Leonard round Tavistock Square garden in the morning before the day’s work began. Her joke of extinguishing, with her paw, Virginia’s match when she lit a cigarette, and so on. Virginia mentions her again and again in letters and diaries.

Together, Vita (Sackville-West) & Harold (Sir Harold Nicholson) had a passion bigger than them-selves, bigger than their marriage, bigger than everything~their garden. No matter what they did during their lives, the legacy they left for generations to come is pure magic.

Vita’s relationship with Virginia, which began shortly after, was of a different calibre – a relationship in which both Harold Nicolson and Virginia’s husband Leonard were supportive presences. The bond that endured between those two women was predominantly, though not exclusively, one of the heart, and of the mind.

We had a surprise visit from the Nicolsons. She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Snob as I am, I trace her passions five hundred years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.

I miss you horribly, and apart from that am permanently infuriated by the thought of what you could make of this country if only you could be got here. You see, you ought to.

And, – mark, – I do care so satisfactorily for the few people that matter to me. (For Virginia? Oh dear me YES, for Virginia.)

But it is a great comfort to think of you when I'm not well – I wonder why. Still nicer – better to see you. So I hope for Tuesday.

I think she is one of the most mentally exciting people I know. She hates the wishy-washiness of Bloomsbury young men. We have made friends by leaps and bounds, in these two days. I love her, but couldn't fall 'in love' with her, so don't be nervous!

Write, dear honey, a nice letter to me. Letter from Vita Long Barn 30 May My poor darling – I do hate these damned headaches that you get. I wish you were ROBUST. I wish also that you spared yourself a little more. I hate to think of you ill, or in pain

You have my full permission.

They strolled down the slope, Chase breaking from the lilac bushes an armful of the heavy plumes. He seemed to do it with an unknowing gesture, as though he couldn’t keep his hands off flowers, and then to be embarrassed on discovering in his arms the wealth that he had gathered. It was as though he had kept an adequate guard over his tongue while allowing his gestures to escape him.