May Sarton Quotations

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

No partner in a love relationship...should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

Now there is time and time is young.O, in this single hour I liveAll of myself and do not move.I, the pursued, who madly ran,Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

They are commiting murder who merely live.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live ...

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing ...

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.

instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

Love is our human miracle.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.

The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable

For after all we make our faces as we go along...

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

True power is given to the vulnerable.

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.

Excellence costs a great deal.

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

In the garden the door is always open into the holy.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.