Quotes from May Sarton

There is no need of words. Our lives will do, Long long enough to learn all of our love, While time, the river, flows gently below, Having no false eternities to prove. The night is full of unspent tenderness And in its silences we rest apart. There is no need of words with which to bless The daily bread, the wine of the full heart. Here are the peaceful days we cannot share. Here is our peace at last, and we not there.

We can accept death. It is the dying that is not and never will be acceptable. For us who have to witness dying, it must always feel as if the very fabric of life were being torn apart.

The roots of love need watering or it dies.

Adventures may be for the adventurous, but home is where the real things are sown and reaped, where in the end the real things happen. They

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

The trouble is that old age is not interesting until one gets there, a foreign country with an unknown language to the young, and even to the middle-aged. I

I have been close to suicide more than once, and more than once have been close to a mystical experience of unity with the universe. The two states resemble each other: one has no wall, one is absolutely naked and diminished to essence. Then death would be the rejection of life because we cannot let go what we wish so hard to keep, but have to let go if we are to continue to grow.

For a little while it is as if my nakedness were clothed in love. But then, when I come back, I shiver in my isolation, and must face again and try to tame the loneliness. The house is no friend when I walk in. Only Punch gives a welcoming scream; there are no flowers. A smell of stale tobacco, unopened windows, my life waiting for me somewhere, asking to be created again.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the highly complex and satisfying process of creation.

Hilary saw life as tending always toward 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.

In another package I found a jar of homemade fig preserves. I felt the blessing in these presents, not bought, but hunted out or made by hand.

Happy the man who can long roaming reap, Like old Ulysses when he shaped his course Homeward at last toward the native source, Seasoned and stretched to plant his dreaming deep.

One did one's work against a steady barrage of demands, of people

Now it threatens to wreck what I care for most—to drive me back into a solitude that has, since I have been in love for a year and a half, ceased to be fruitful, become loneliness instead.

I shall never be one of those directly active (except as a teacher, occasionally), but now and then I am made aware that my work, odd though it seems, does help people.

she had recognized at once her own kind, conflicted, nervous, driven, violent, affectionate...

I saw you as a person of primary intensity - they are rare. They live in Hell a good part of their lives.

Pero ahora sabía, de un modo en que antes no lo había sabido, que lo que había heredado era vivificante y reparador para mi vida y lo sería hasta el final de mis días o incluso más allá. ... llegué a la conclusión de que si uno es capaz de profundizar lo suficiente, seguro que es capaz de atravesar la roca.

the thread of communion when two human beings, whatever their age or sex may be, give themselves away. It does not happen often; it never happens lightly, and when it has happened, there is a bond between the two that nothing can never wholly destory.

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know... if one is honest.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there's a bedrock of truth, however hard. It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant.

She had not imagined that she would be so fertilized by a human being again.

Old, young, male, female - her capacity to be touched, to be involved, to care was, she realized, that still of a young girl. How did one keep growing otherwise? What was life all about otherwise? What separates us from animals except just this - that we can be moved by each other, and not primarily for sexual purposes?

Hilary had always imagined that one of the blessings of old age would be that one might live by and for these essentials...the light on a wall.