quotes by May Sarton

"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
— May Sarton

"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self."
— May Sarton

"Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite."
— May Sarton

"The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become."
— May Sarton

"I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were."
— May Sarton

"Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is a ll closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go. "
— May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)

"One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?"
— May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)

"Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels."
— May Sarton

"If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! 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'?"
— May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)

"I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it."
— May Sarton

"In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on."
— May Sarton (At Seventy: A Journal)

"For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading."
— May Sarton

"I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love."
— May Sarton

"Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill."
— May Sarton

"Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time."
— May Sarton

"I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.""
— May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)

"the experiential fact that a writer not only feels but watches himself felling"
— May Sarton