Recovering Quotes

“Still, a person who cannot express love is stopping the flow of life, is censoring where censorship is a form of self-indulgence, the fear of giving oneself away.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“...Failure cannot be erased. It is built in to a life and helps us grow. Failure cannot be erased, but it can be understood.

Most people carry around a load of feeling that they bury or pretend is not there because it is too painful and alarming to cope with or because it involved unbearable guilt. Anger against a parent, for example.


I knew the tide of woe was rising, that woe that seizes me like anger, and is a form of anger, and I didn’t know what to do to stop it, so I got up and picked flowers, cooked my dinner, looked at the news, all the same usual routine that can ward off the devils or suddenly clear the air as when a thunderstorm seems to be coming and then dissipates….it always happens when there is a galaxy of problems that get knit together into one huge outcry against the sense of being abandoned or orphanhood…”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“We cannot withdraw love without damaging ourselves. I have been badly hurt again but I see this morning that it does not really matter because I perceive the truth. Rage is the deprived infant in me but there is also a compassionate mother in me and she will come back with her healing powers in time.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“I am starved for tenderness and that is what is the matter with me and has been the matter with me for months”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“When grace is given it comes to us as joy, maybe, but it can also be earned, I am convinced, through the rigorous examination of the sources of pain.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“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.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“It has been ground into me by the bitter experiences of last year that I am old, that I must be denied some things, that the door has closed forever on passionate communion with another human being. The mutilated body appears then to be the physical evidence of that fact. But the phoenix rising again from the flames tells me otherwise. The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal

“The truth of her nature gave out an undimmed light—and all her love of beauty, and of persons, was made poignant by this imperishable integrity.” Her strength came from very deep and had nothing to do with discipline or control. She never became a character, set in her ways, but remained to the end a nature, rich and open to life, able to deal with radical change and to welcome it.”
― May Sarton, Recovering: A Journal