May Sarton Quotes

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

~ May Sarton

The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.

~ May Sarton

Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

~ May Sarton

I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom

~ May Sarton

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

~ May Sarton

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

~ May Sarton

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

~ May Sarton

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?

~ May Sarton

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

~ May Sarton

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?

~ May Sarton

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

~ May Sarton

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

~ May Sarton

But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.

~ May Sarton

And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

~ May Sarton

There are some griefs so loudThey could bring down the sky,And there are griefs so stillNone knows how deep they lie,Endured, never expended.There are old griefs so proudThey never speak a word;They never can be mended.And these nourish the willAnd keep it iron-hard.

~ May Sarton

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

~ May Sarton

What does myself now say to me?Open the door of Mystery.

~ May Sarton

...The means of choice:She might choose to ascendThe falling dream,By some angelic power without a nameReverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,Know height without an end,Density melt to air, silence yield a voice--Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace.

~ May Sarton

A bolt that raised her heart to blazing heightAnd made the vertical the very thrust of hope,And found its path at last(Slow work of Grace).

~ May Sarton

...when the petals fallSay it is beautiful and good, say it is well

~ May Sarton

It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.

~ May Sarton

I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.

~ May Sarton

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.

~ May Sarton

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

~ May Sarton

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

~ May Sarton

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

~ May Sarton

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.

~ May Sarton

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

~ May Sarton

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

~ May Sarton

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

~ May Sarton

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

~ May Sarton

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

~ May Sarton

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

~ May Sarton

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

~ May Sarton

Life comes in clusters clusters of solitude then clusters when there is hardly time to breathe.

~ May Sarton

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.

~ May Sarton

What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.

~ May Sarton

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

~ May Sarton

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

~ May Sarton

For inside all the weakness of old age the spirit God knows is as mercurial as it ever was.

~ May Sarton