Quotes from May Sarton

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

It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.

She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

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

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

Time unbounded is hard to handle.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.

Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.

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

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

... love is healing, even rootless love.

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

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.

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

The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.