Quotes from May Sarton

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

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.

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

There is no end to the work of salvageIn the drowning high seas of ChristmasWhen loneliness, in the name of Christ(That longing!), attacks the world.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

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.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

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

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

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

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? 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.

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

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.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.