Quotes from May Sarton

For after all we make our faces as we go along...

Plants do not speak, but their silence is alive with change.

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

It is not so much trying to keep alive As trying to keep from blowing apart From inner explosions every day.

I am not ready to die, But I am learning to trust death As I have trusted life. I am moving Toward a new freedom

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.

There are some griefs so loud They could bring down the sky, And there are griefs so still None knows how deep they lie, Endured, never expended. There are old griefs so proud They never speak a word; They never can be mended. And these nourish the will And keep it iron-hard.

Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn't start at the first try. So the few things that we still do, such as cooking (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.

So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.

Still, a person who cannot express love is stopping the flow of life, is censoring where censorship is a form of self-indulgence, the fear of giving oneself away.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

when the petals fall Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love.

Nothing moves fast in Texas except the windmills And the hawk that rises up with a clatter of wings. (Nothing more startling there than sudden motion, Everything is so still.)

Don't deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

For a long time, for years, I have carried in my mind the excruciating image of plants, bulbs, in a cellar, trying to grow without light, putting out white shoots that will inevitably wither.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.

We have to break the mirror to be ourselves...

How does one grow up?" I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, "By thinking.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.