Quotes from May Sarton

I suppose I have a thing about old women. Their characters may be rather stylized, but once you get past mannerism, they are, well? how to put it? Transparent. It isn't worth it any longer to wear a mask.

photographs freeze the current of life.

A face without lines that shows no mark of what has been lived through in a long life suggests something unlived, empty, behind

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

Friendship supplied the root-- It was planted years ago-- To bring me flowers and seed Through the long drought

At least poppy never boared you. Half the marriages i know are temple to boredom

I have longed for one person with whom everything could be shared, but I am slowly making my peace with the knowledge that this will never happen.

I began the day with Vaughn Williams' Mass sung by the King's College choir. There are days when only religious music will do. Under the light of eternity things, the daily trivia, the daily frustrations, all away. It is all a matter of getting to the center of the beam.

And the discipline of work provides an exercise bar, so that the wild, irrational motions of the soul become formal and creative. It literally keeps one from falling on one's face.

And all that may be an inherited grace, but Anne, within yet apart from her family, is unique. Of what is her genius made? That is the mystery I have been contemplating this morning. Perhaps the key is in her capacity to make herself available on any day, at any time, to whatever human joy or grief longs to be fulfilled or assuaged by sharing … longs to pour itself out and to be understood.

Fur Person,' he decided then—not really a name at all, but a way of describing the relationship between a Gentle Cat and his true friends among the human people. For a Fur Person, he saw in his state of extreme concentration, is not just an ordinary cat. He is a cat who is also a person.

Anne lives each moment of the day as if it were the first and the last, with the whole of herself.

feelings bore me. is that a crime

I began the day with Vaughn Williams' Mass sung by the King's College choir. There are days when only religious music will do. Under the light of eternity things, the daily trivia, the daily frustrations, all fall away. It is all a matter of getting to the center of the beam.

Whatever people I take into my life I take in because they challenge me and I challenge them at the deepest level. Such relationships are rarely serene, but they are nourishing.

There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour-put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.

Not enough has been said of the value of a life lived alone in that it is lived in a house with an open door, with room for the stranger, for the new friend to be taken in and cherished.

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!

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.

I shiver in my isolation, and must face again and try to tame my loneliness.

The sun has suddenly come out and there is a bright blue sky—all this happened while I wrote a few words! Astonishing!

The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. So 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 reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

For if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage—one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair—the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the "sacred." We