Quotes from May Sarton

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

and Andy, gloomy and self-devouring, sat at his desk and chewed the cud of memory.

A bolt that raised her heart to blazing height And made the vertical the very thrust of hope, And found its path at last (Slow work of Grace).

I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space - all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out.

Not happiness, perhaps, but something like New England itself—struggle, occasional triumph over adversity, above all the power to endure and to be renewed. For here the roses grow beside the granite.

Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they've got to get hold of someone to prove they're worth while," she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.

Let silence in. She will rarely speak or mew, She will sleep on my bed And all I have ever been Either false or true Will live again in my head. For it is now or not As old age silts the stream, To shove away the clutter, To untie every knot, To take the time to dream, To come back to still water.

Laura felt now completely detached from her body. It was, she considered, simply a piece of machinery that was running down. But how could the separation be made? How could she find herself without this machine that labored for breath and rejected food and sent her into misery with the coughing? It could not be tamed. It could not be cajoled. It had, she felt, to be quite simply rejected as irrelevant.

There was such a thing as woman's work and it consisted chiefly, Hillary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper.

Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing...enduring...waiting.

one of the privileges of old age was that no holds were barred. You were permitted to be absolutely honest.

a hand (Standish's are ice cold) and

What they never understood about her solitary life was that it was a solitude so inhabited by the past, that she was never alone in it, except sometimes in the rich disorder of her work room upstairs.

in Sante Fe time is not that shallow. There one can go deep into a continuity as the pueblos and the culture they represent take one back at least eight hundred years through a single Indian dance. For a European that continuity is life-giving.

Every creature needs luck, and he is very ungrateful who ascribes his success to his merit and naught else. All the merit in the world will not save a man against bad luck. The theory of success is written by successful men who would be wiser if they boasted less.…

A GRAY DAY … but, strangely enough, a gray day makes the bunches of daffodils in the house have a particular radiance

Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long

We go up to Heaven and down to Hell a dozen times a day.

I have said elsewhere that we have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can—if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough—be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being, what the hazards are of a fairly usual, everyday kind.

To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive.

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

The delights of the poet as I jotted them down turned out to be light, solitude, the natural world, love, time, creation itself. Suddenly after the months of depression I am fully alive in all these areas, and awake.

I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within. People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.

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