Quotes from May Sarton

In the country of pain we are each alone.

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

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.

I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.

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.

We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.

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

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.

I'm only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

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

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always she had to admit interesting.

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

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

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

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.

It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?