Quotes from May Sarton

Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.

I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.

Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

Art must be nourished by faith, the faith of an equal.

There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always towards chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.

Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.

It is hope-giving to consider the young, and it is also hope-giving to consider growth as a constant. Here I am at fifty-eight and in this past year I have only begun to understand what loving is … forced to my knees again and again like a gardener planting bulbs or weeding, so that I may once more bring a relationship to flower, keep it truly alive.

Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost— Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. Every human instinct is to turn away. Not see. It is, I'm afraid, exemplified by Reagan who refuses to imagine the suffering of twelve million unemployed and the degradation of men and women who are deprived of work and treated in this country like pariahs.

What I long for with a deep ache inside me is sacred music. I long for the Fauré Requiem, for the Haydn "Mass in Time of War," for some pure celestial music that could lift me above myself, into that sphere where great art lives, beyond what man can be in himself, the intimation of the sacred—what cannot be dirtied or smudged by wickedness or by anger, which no threat can touch.

We have to make myths of our lives; it is the only way to live them without despair. ...The inner world, the world of poetry, is as much nourished by the bad times as by anything.

What does myself now say to me? Open the door of Mystery.

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.

Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination?

Now I become myself. Now I become myself. It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces

Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as "irrelevant"? When

There is always some sleight of hand going on in writing autobiography. So much has to be left out, especially things that might hurt or dismay people. But in a novel one can say everything. The novel is often autobiography distilled and / or transcended.

I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the silt—unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.

A Fur Person must be adopted by catly humans, tactful, delicate, respectful, indulgent; these are fairly rare, though not as rare as might be supposed.

The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.

Self-reliance? Yes, but that first spring I had to learn dependency too. By crying for help and seeing help come from several directions, I began to learn what the village is all about: on the one hand, respect for privacy, and on the other, awareness of each other's needs. So, however solitary some of us may look to an outsider, we are in truth part of an invisible web and supported by its presence.

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 any encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it. After

And now we who are writing women and strange monsters Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers, Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life.