Faith & Spirit Quote by Vita Sackville-West

Writing, for Vita Sackville-West, isn’t a tidy record of who you already are; it’s a chase scene. “Catches the changes of his mind on the hop” frames thought as something quick, half-wild, and liable to slip away if you reach for it too slowly. The line quietly dismantles the romantic idea of the novelist as a serene observer. Her writer is an athlete of attention, tracking the self mid-metamorphosis, not posing it for a portrait.

The real sting is in her insistence that growth is “alarming.” Most talk about artistic development like it’s a straight ascent: more craft, more wisdom, more polish. Sackville-West admits the cost. Growth means you outgrow yesterday’s convictions, styles, even loyalties. The mind’s upgrades come with a kind of bereavement: you lose the comfort of a stable identity. That’s why the sentence feels almost breathless, stacking “exciting,” “dynamic,” “alarming” like someone talking themselves through a risky leap.

Context matters here: a modernist-adjacent novelist shaped by a world reorganizing itself through war, shifting gender roles, and new ideas of psychology and interior life. In that climate, the “soul” and the “mind” aren’t pieties; they’re contested territories. She’s defending the writer’s inner volatility as a serious instrument, arguing that literature’s job isn’t to embalms the self but to document its live evolution - and to make the reader feel that unease as proof something real is happening.