Quotes from May Sarton

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence—nature, the arts, human love.

We cannot withdraw love without damaging ourselves. I have been badly hurt again but I see this morning that it does not really matter because I perceive the truth. Rage is the deprived infant in me but there is also a compassionate mother in me and she will come back with her healing powers in time.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

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.

We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth.

The means of choice: She might choose to ascend The falling dream, By some angelic power without a name Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness, Know height without an end, Density melt to air, silence yield a voice-- Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace.

It is time I came back to my real life After this voyage to an island with no name, Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.

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.

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give another human being is detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless, always lays some burden on the other person. How to learn to love in such a light, airy way that there is no burden?

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…

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.

Sometimes I imagine life itself as merely a long preparation and waiting, a long darkness of growth toward these adventures of the spirit, a picaresque novel, so to speak, in which the episodes are all inward.

But as time goes on we not only remember specific things in relation to the people we have loved; their lives get built into our lives and finally the transference is complete. We are what we are because of them.

What we have not has made us what we are. Those surface consolations have to go.

But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.

It is alarming to feel the soul Leap to the surface and find no sheltering wall.

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

But when Ellen throws at me that I have never had to struggle I feel like saying, 'Maybe. But I have had to learn to be capable in a hundred ways that were no pleasure or nourishment really. If I had not been rich, I might have become a good painter.' Instead, right now I had better get the silver out and see what needs polishing.

When grace is given it comes to us as joy, maybe, but it can also be earned, I am convinced, through the rigorous examination of the sources of pain.