The Edwardians Quotes

“It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Lovers, or potential lovers, ought never to meet before the afternoon.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“We could never have hit it off for long. There was never anything but love to keep us together.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“All love is a weakness, if it comes to that, in so far as it destroys some part of our independence.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Since one cannot have truth,’ cried Sebastian, struggling into his evening shirt, ‘let us at least have good manners.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“There is another danger which you can scarcely hope to escape. It is the weight of the past. Not only will you esteem material objects because they are old — I am not superficial enough to reproach you for so harmless a weakness — but, more banefully, you will venerate ideas and institutions because they have remained for a long time in force; for so long a time as to appear to you absolute and unalterable. That is real atrophy of the soul. You inherit your code ready-made. That waxwork figure labelled Gentleman will be forever mopping and mowing at you… You will never wonder why you pursue a certain course of behaviour; you will pursue it because it is the thing to do. And the past is to blame for all this; inheritance, tradition, upbringing; your nurse, your father, your tutor, your public school, Chevron, your ancestors, all the gamut. Even should you try to break loose it will be in vain… though you may wobble in your orbit, you can never escape from it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiences and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Only it won’t be an earthquake - not in England, England isn’t seismic - it will be a gradual crumbling.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“I wouldn’t commit murder for the sake of an allegory.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“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.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Lady Roehampton was not a young woman; but she was still, though not without taking a certain amount of trouble, beautiful. This question of the middle-aged woman’s beauty and desirability has never sufficiently been exploited by novelists.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“The second act of Tristan is no fit fare for a young man unhappily in love.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“His mother and her friends might be more amusing, more up-to-date; they were certainly more fashionable; but the Dowager Duchess carried an air of solid assurance which belonged to a less uneasy age. That slightly raucous note of defiance was absent from her pronouncements. She did not protest; she merely ignored. Nothing unpleasant ever ruffled her serenity, because she simply failed to notice it. Darwin and the Labour Party alike had passed unnoticed under the bulwark of her mighty nose; the one in eighteen seventy-one, the other in nineteen-six. She remained unaware that the Americans were discovering Europe far more rapidly than the Europeans had discovered America.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“As her husband watched her, seeing the little familiar gestures by which she twisted up an escaping curl, or pinned a bow so that it might nestle just under her ear, and heard her prattle of last night’s ball—for in intimate life she was as good-humoured as a happy child—he felt nothing but tolerance towards this creature of frivolity and shameless vanity.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“The old rooms, in the candlelight, inspired him with a tenderness he would not by daylight have credited. Their beauty, which he had thought to be exterior, became significant; they were quickened by the breath of some existence which they had once enjoyed, when no eye regarded them as a museum, but took them for granted as the natural setting for daily life; and that applied to their furnishings too, to the mirrors into whose dim pools women had stolen many a frank or furtive glance; to the chairs whose now faded velvets had received the weight of limbs regardless of mud on the boots.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“What charming children they both were, he reflected; natural, unspoilt, and so good to look at. Simple? He would not go so far as to say that, though they were certainly simple in what he called the right way; that is to say, they were easily amused, laughed readily, and enjoyed the pleasures of their physical well-being.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Earlier in the morning he had thought of Chevron as a dead thing, an anachronism, an exquisite survival, and his democratic instincts had brought a slightly sardonic smile to his lips; now he modified his conception, and smiled again, but this time he also sighed for the passing of something so characteristic, so intrinsically real, and so gracious. It must go, he thought, go with all its absurd paraphernalia of servants and luxury; but in its going it would carry with it much that was dignified, traditional, and—though he laughed at the word—elegant.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“All was warmth and security, leisure and continuity. An order of things which appeared unchangeable to the mind of nineteen hundred and five. Why should they change, since they had never changed?”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Down in the steward’s room the butler offered his arm gravely to the Duchess of Hull’s maid, and conducted her to the place at his right hand. Lord Roehampton’s valet did the same by Mrs Wickenden the housekeeper. Mrs Wickenden, of course, was not married, and her title was bestowed only by courtesy. The order of precedence was very rigidly observed, for the visiting maids and valets enjoyed the same hierarchy as their mistresses and masters; where ranks coincided, the date of creation had to be taken into account, and for this purpose a copy of Debrett was always kept in the housekeeper’s room—last year’s Debrett, appropriated by Mrs Wickenden as soon as the new issue had been placed in her Grace’s boudoir. The maids and valets enjoyed not only the same precedence as their employers, but also their names. Thus, although the Duchess of Hull’s maid had stayed many times at Chevron, and was indeed quite a crony of Mrs Wickenden’s, invited to private sessions in the housekeeper’s room, where the two elderly gossips sat stirring their cups of tea, she was never known as anything but Miss Hull, and none of her colleagues in the steward’s room would ever have owned to a knowledge of what her true name might be.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“All self-respect seems to be going out of the world. Sebastian has some extraordinary theory that people are becoming more honest towards themselves. All I can say is that we may not have been honest, but we did at least know how to behave. It is all very puzzling. Naturally one wants to hold on to anything one can.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“but what fascinated Teresa above all, so that she could scarcely take her eyes from it, was the address, Chevron, under a ducal coronet. ‘Just Chevron, John!’ said Teresa; ‘nothing else! no town, no county! You see, it’s so well known. Just Chevron, England. If you addressed a letter like that, from any part of the world, it would get here,”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“The turf was white with frost, and each separate blade of grass stuck up, as brittle as an icicle. The grass crunched beneath his feet, and looking back across the plain he could see the track of his footsteps, making a dark line across the rime. Sarah stepped delicately, and from time to time she lay down to lick the balls of ice which gathered between her pads; Henry, who was made of coarser stuff, careered madly round and round in circles, galloping like a little horse, bounding over the tussocks, his ears flying, his feathers streaming. Sebastian cheered him on. He wished he could tear about like Henry. They came to the edge of the plain; Sebastian broke into a run down the slope; now they were in the valley; still they ran, startling the deer that nosed about among some armfuls of hay thrown down for them. They bounded away, the spaniels after them; they bounded up the slope, over the dead bracken, bouncing as though they had springs in their feet, their white scuts flashing between the trees. Sebastian stood still to watch; he felt so happy that he thought his heart would burst. Henry and Sarah, returning, dragging themselves on their bellies up to him, were astonished when they were not beaten.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Nothing will ever persuade me that the relations between the squire and the craftsman, or the squire and the labourer, or the squire and the farmer, don’t contain the elements of decency and honesty and mutual respect. I wish only that civilisation could have developed along these lines. We have got away now from the day when we under-paid our labourers and cut off their ears and slit their noses for stealing a bit of wood, and we might have looked forward to an era when we could all have lived decently together, under a system peculiarly well suited to English people. But, as you say, there are now too many people. There is too much industrialism. My idyllic England vanishes.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“He is a real person. A real understanding exists between him and Wickenden and Bassett. They speak the same language, even though Wickenden drops his aitches and Sebastian doesn’t. They respect each other. And I’ll say this in Sebastian’s favour: that the day when Wickenden ceases to respect Sebastian will come sooner than the day when Sebastian ceases to respect Wickenden.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Usted me ha deslumbrado, le he admirado, le he contemplado y he pensado en usted, en cierto modo le he venerado casi, no me importa reconocerlo, pero eso no es lo mismo que estar enamorada.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Si era mundana, lo era a escala grandiosa. Si era interesada, pujaba por las mayores fortunas. Si amaba, era en los lugares más encumbrados. Si reconocía ambición en sí, era por el poder más alto. Si sufría, era en el plano de la tragedia.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Aparentemente no tenía opiniones: no tenía más que estados de ánimo a cuya intensidad arrolladora solo igualaba la velocidad con la que sucedían. No se acostumbraba a su impermanencia; cualquiera que fuera su condición mental del momento, al instante creía ver en ella una visión asentada de la vida. Súbitamente alarmado cuando ese estado le abandonaba, enseguida pasaba a otro, con olvidadizo optimismo.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians