Vita Sackville-West

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.

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.

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.

Simplify life as one might, one could not wholly escape its enormous complication.

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.

...his diminishing honours trailing away behind him like the tail of a comet - he had drooped in his chair after dinner, and the accumulation of ninety years had receded abruptly into history.

One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.

Numbers exist in the void; it is impossible to imagine the destruction of numbers, even though you imagine the destruction of the universe.

THAT I should live and look with open eyes I count as half my claim to Paradise. I have not crept beneath cathedral arches, But bathed in streams beneath the silver larches;

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

Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page.

She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen in its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead. So, she thought, could she at last put circles on her life. Slowly she crossed that day, as one crosses a field by a little path through the grasses, with the sorrel and the buttercups waving on either side; she crossed it again slowly, from breakfast to bed-time, and each hour, as one hand of the clock passed over the other, regained for her its separate character: this was the hour, she thought, when I first came downstairs that day, swinging my hat by its ribbons; this was the hour when he persuaded me into the garden, and sat with me on the seat beside the lake, and told me it was not true that with one blow of its wing a swan could break the leg of a man.

Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me - I have a great turn that way myself - [VW]

Lovers, or potential lovers, ought never to meet before the afternoon.

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