Quotes from May Sarton

of its growing. I really must

Yesterday I had a wonderful day with Danny, a man of twenty who has grown a lot of wisdom through suffering. We recognize each other as fellow sufferers, possibly suffering for the same reason, an acute awareness beyond what we are able to put into action or to 'be', as it were.

Love opens the doors into everything.. including, and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

When I talk about solitude I am really talking also about making space for that intense, hungry face at the window, starved cat, starved person.

There is a mystical rite under the material act of cleaning and tidying, for what is done with love is always more than itself and partakes of the celestial orders

Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

Schubert Impromptus that Louise Bogan gave me—Opus 90 and Opus 142, Gieseking.

We are one, the house and I, and I am happy to be alone-- time to think, time to be. This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and I feel stupendously rich to have it.

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many.

It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes, fears.

When it comes to the important things one is always alone, and it may be that the virtue or possible insight I get from being so obviously alone-- being physically and in every way absolutely alone much of the time-- is a way into the universal state of man. The way in which one handles this absolute aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is the great psychic journey of everyman.

It is restful even to imagine expression without words.

I want to throw up what I am asked to contain and to digest.

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. Most people swallow the unacceptable because it makes life so much easier. At what point does one feel that doing battle, however painful and rending, is necessary?

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being is detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is self- less, always lays some burden on the other person.

These angers are crippling, like a fit when they happen, and then, when they are over, haunting me with remorse. Those who know me well and love me have come to accept them as part of me; yet I know they are unacceptable.

It takes a long time, all one's life, to learn to love one person well-with enough distance, with enough humility...

THE JOKE is on me. I filled this weekend with friends so that I would not go down into depression, not knowing that I should have turned the corner and be writing poems.

The big question, I jotted down during the long wait at the long wait at the airport, is how to hope and what to hope for. We are citizens of corrupt country, of a corrupt vision. There is such a sense of death and of being buried under the weight of technocracy. How to keep cool and get hold of the essential... and, above all, how to recognize the essential.

It occurs to me that boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat. When I lay down this afternoon, I could not rest and finally got up because I was in a sweat of panic, panic for no definable reason, a panic of solitude, I presume.

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.

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.

Love is our human miracle.

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.