Quotes from May Sarton

LAST NIGHT I lay awake for a long time, a really good "think" for a change.

Wholeness, so far as statesmen go, may have something to do with speaking in one's own words. De Gaulle did not call in "writers"; the very idea is grotesque. The leader who allows others to speak for him is abdicating. Who is speaking via Nixon? Who wrote this phrase or that? One is never quite sure.

unless we recognize the radical nature of Christianity, which means shedding the imperatives of the secular world and taking with extreme seriousness the imperatives of God, we are kidding ourselves.

one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

Women have come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves...This cannot be done against men, and that's the real problem...It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.

As a child I was always borrowing other people's families, being invited for a week or a month in the summer to share a family life.

I learned about marriage from my parents and their good, fruitful, but painful and not complete marriage, and from my own private life and the men and women whom I have loved.

People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without. The light goes early.

KAIROS A unique time in a person's life; an opportunity for change.

Today I feel centered and time is a friend instead of the old enemy.

The truth of her nature gave out an undimmed light—and all her love of beauty, and of persons, was made poignant by this imperishable integrity." Her strength came from very deep and had nothing to do with discipline or control. She never became a character, set in her ways, but remained to the end a nature, rich and open to life, able to deal with radical change and to welcome it.

Once more I realize acutely that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

The point is that I loved math with a passion. I loved the order, the clarity of it, the absolute in it. And I think that my students felt that, for me, something more than mere math was involved, an attitude toward life itself. I liked a straight answer to a straight question, in just the way that I felt the beauty of a perfect equation or, even more, a geometric figure.

A teacher cannot become too human or too vulnerable, or he ceases to be the rock every young person needs.

What I am getting at is that in a place like this where we are deprived of so much already, the small things that delight the senses - food, a soft blanket, a percale sheet and pillow case, a bottle of lavender cologne, a linen handkerchief seem necessities if one is to survive.

O, in this single hour I live, All of myself and do not move. I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still and stop the sun!

The true nature of a person is communicated as much, perhaps even more, by touch than by the look in his eyes.

He is rather an elegant creature and I enjoy looking at him. He pleases me as a man and as a human being. Brilliance, intellectually speaking, is not required of the ministry, but integrity is.

Quite often I can get real music on the transistor radio in the evenings. It makes what used to be long hours after Anna has gone home a time of marvels. I marvel that such beauty flows in through my ears, unheard by anyone else. What a miracle!

Together they breathed deeply, like people who exaggerate their soul because they have no other riches.' May Sarton, quoting Jean Dominique

if people know nothing about love they will always make it into a sexual matter. The limit of what I longed for with X was simply to lie down somewhere beside her and to hold her hand - Why that? Because words were not a possible means of deep exchange between us, because I longed so to rest in her, to believe too that she might rest in me.

I believe we are forgiven at the instant of asking forgiveness, for asking forgiveness is an act of faith. It places the soul in eternity.

There is really only one deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most. ... The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

When it comes to the important things one is always alone.