The Letters of Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf

1

"Fail gloriously than dingily succeed"

2

"Pinker and I try to console one another. She sleeps on my bed, and clings to me as the one comparatively familiar thing in a strange and probably hostile world...... I had to explain that Mrs Woolf lived in London, a separate life, a fact which was as unpleasant to me as it could be to any spaniel puppy...... I explained that everybody always betrayed one sooner or later, and usually gave one away to somebody else, and that the only things to do was to make the best of it." 

People were not kind, and nature was indifferent to human wishes. This was an atavistic world ruled by laws that inevitably destroyed what one loved. "Something always does, when one wants a things to passionately, " she had written just a little earlier.

3

She added with her characteristic penchant for high romance, was a "mixture of the tragic, the grotesque, and the magnificent." 

4

The diary entry of March 11, 1935: "My friendship with Vita is over. Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls... But her voice saying 'Virginia?" outside the tower room was as enchanting as ever....... & that's the end of it. And there is no bitterness, & no disillusion, only a certain emptiness."