Violet Trefusis > Quotes

“Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. 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.
(- to Vita Sackville-West, October 25, 1918)”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent — Live — live fully, live passionately, live disastrously if necessary. Live the gamut of human experiences, build, destroy, build up again! Live, let’s live, you and I — let’s live as none ever lived before, let’s explore and investigate, let’s tread fearlessly where even the most intrepid have faltered and held back!”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“...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.”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“Do you think that love has to be requited to be genuine? On the contrary, it thrives on indifference.”
― Violet Trefusis, Pirates at Play

“I want you. I want you hungrily, frenziedly, passionately. I am starving for you, if you must know it. Not only the physical you, but your fellowship, your sympathy, the innumerable points of view we share. I can’t exist without you, you are my affinity…I want you for my own, I want to go away with you. I must and will and damn the world and damn the consequences and anyone had better look out for themselves who dares to become an obstacle in my path.”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“I love you, because I have seen your soul.”
― Violet Trefusis

“He loved the interminable winter nights, when the dissatisfied wind mewed through the keyhole, and gusts of acrid smoke were driven down through the chimney; the imperfect silence when you awoke, as of a conversation hastily lulled, objects being hastily replaced. ‘Blow, blow thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.’ Why was it that he felt so perfectly attuned to winter, to its fatalistic expectation of the worst, then, when the worst came, its rustic heroisms and shouldering of burdens, improvised ingeniousness, constructive despair?”
― Violet Trefusis, Pirates at Play

“I love you with all my bruised heart.”
― Violet Trefusis

“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.”
― Violet Trefusis

“His neglected heart, forsaken, isolated, was more lonely than the ace of hearts in the middle of a playing card.”
― Violet Trefusis, Pirates at Play

“Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of life, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.”
― Violet Trefusis

“The same word passed through three minds, simultaneously, philosophical, fatalistic, the eternal refuge of the Italian: Pazienza....”
― Violet Trefusis, Pirates at Play

“The following evening John left with Lady Shorne for the south of France, without so much as a word to me."

Alexa felt as if she were hearing that fateful cliche for the first time. "Without so much as a word." No matter how much she tried to see it from every point of view, its meaning was always clear. John was a coward. Anne was his victim. The roles were the opposite of what she had supposed. It was Anne who had been heroic, not John. John was a coward, a mere puppet into whom both Anne and Alexa had managed to breathe a semblance of life. He was as much the creation of one as of the other.”
― Violet Trefusis, Broderie Anglaise

“Across my life only one work will be written: "waste" _ waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.”
― Violet Trefusis

“Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me?...You are a mirage that recedes to the degree that one approaches it.”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921

“I must go through life a jack of all trades, and wanting. Am I to be cursed with dilettantism till I die? [...] Am I, the most inveterate and consistent worshipper of the shrine of Beauty in all my life never to accomplish something beautiful?”
― Violet Trefusis, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921