Quotes from May Sarton

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

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.

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

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.

It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

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.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

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