“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.”
— Jacques Lacan
“You are the person I loved in the best and simplest way; but there is lots that is neither good or simple in me.”
— Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Harold Nicolson, 1 February 1920
“I find I get more and more disagreeably solitary; In fact I foresee the day when I shall have gone too far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all.”
— Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf
“Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let’s live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.”
— Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918
“I am looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.”
— Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Virginia Woolf, 4 February 1926
The signs as letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
- Aries: "Do you really love me? Much? Passionately not reasonably?"
- Taurus: "But I do adore you — every part of you from heel to hair. Never will you shake me off, try as you may."
- Gemini: "I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about — with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it."
- Cancer: "I wish I didn’t love you so much. No I don’t though; that’s not true. I am glad I do. I don’t know what to say to you except that it tore the heart out of my body saying goodbye to you."
- Leo: "Yes, I am glad you miss me, even if it is ‘damned unpleasant.'"
- Virgo: "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 really don’t resent it."
- Libra: "The flowers have come and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you—"
- Scorpio: "I wish you could live in my brain for a week. It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion."
- Sagittarius: "You may have discovered entire new countries in your own soul."
- Capricorn: "I find I get more and more disagreeably solitary; In fact I foresee the day when I shall have gone too far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all. Will you, please, remember to pull away the coverings from time to time?"
- Aquarius: "I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd."
- Pisces: "I suppose it is good for the soul to be hurt and perplexed perpetually. I know at least that I miss you damnably: that is a good fixed star."