Quotes from May Sarton

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.

Though friendship is not quick to burn, It is explosive stuff

What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.

... 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.

have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

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

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.

When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.

I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything — except itself.