Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing Quotes

“I loved them in the way one loves at any age — if it’s real at all — obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, 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." She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive... if he thought she didn't know what she was talking about! "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“Sometimes I imagine life itself as merely a long preparation and waiting, a long darkness of growth toward these adventures of the spirit, a picaresque novel, so to speak, in which the episodes are all inward.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the "creative" is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always towards 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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“Nothing gets easier as one gets older. Everything is harder, even buttoning one's slipper!”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm!”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“one of the privileges of old age was that no holds were barred. You were permitted to be absolutely honest.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“photographs freeze the current of life.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“I suppose I have a thing about old women. Their characters may be rather stylized, but once you get past mannerism, they are, well? how to put it? Transparent. It isn't worth it any longer to wear a mask.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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?”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“She had not imagined that she would be so fertilized by a human being again.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know... if one is honest.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“I saw you as a person of primary intensity - they are rare. They live in Hell a good part of their lives.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“she had recognized at once her own kind, conflicted, nervous, driven, violent, affectionate...”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“One did one's work against a steady barrage of demands, of people”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

“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.”
― May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing