Quotes from May Sarton

I am starved for tenderness and that is what is the matter with me and has been the matter with me for months

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, toward those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time. The apparently measured time has immeasureable space within it, and in this it resembles music. The routine I established

For only the ill are well, Only the hunted, free

For a Fur Person is a cat whom human beings love in the right way, allowing him to keep his dignity, his reserve and his freedom. And a Fur Person is a cat who has come to love one or, in very exceptional cases, two human beings and who has decided to stay with them as long as he lives. This can only happen if the human being has imagined part of himself into a cat just as the cat has imagined part of himself into a human being. It is a mutual exchange.

Think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief ( it seems ) they can let go...Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long...Let it go.

My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a "symptom"? There

Hilary has often asked herself why she felt the need for flowers..., but there it was. The house felt empty and desolate without them. They were silent guests who must be made happy, and who gave the atmosphere a kind of sou.

How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm!

Our two solitudes never quite merged, perhaps, but accepted each other gratefully.

Here in the United States we appear to be becoming more and more a country devoted to amenities for the rich, more and more neglectful of the poor.

Nothing gets easier as one gets older. Everything is harder, even buttoning one's slipper!

There is really only one possible prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence.

In Texas there's so much space words have a way Of getting lost in the silence before they're spoken So people hang on a long time to what they have to say; And when they say it the silence is not broken, But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills, And they are part of that silence that outlives them.

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seeds every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.

A garden is a perpetual experiment. It may evoke, but it can rarely memorialize, at least in the sense of imitation. Gardens are as original as people.

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die. Why do I say that? Partly because they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

I too have known the inward disturbance of exile, The great peril of being at home nowhere, The dispersed center, the dividing love; Not here, nor there, leaping across ocean, Turning, returning to each strong allegiance; American, but with this difference - parting.

Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person

It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through - the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or another.

All aspiring writers say these things: I will not compromise and write a best seller!—as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.

One thing is certain, and I have always known it—the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about …

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 or the work.

In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.