May Sarton quotes:

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

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

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

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

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

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."

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.

Time unbounded is hard to handle.

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

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

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.

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.

It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?

...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable

I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).

I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.

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?

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go"...

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.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

There are some griefs so loudThey could bring down the sky,And there are griefs so stillNone knows how deep they lie,Endured, never expended.There are old griefs so proudThey never speak a word;They never can be mended.And these nourish the willAnd keep it iron-hard.

...when the petals fallSay it is beautiful and good, say it is well

But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.

I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.

It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.

Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed 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.

And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

"How does one grow up?" I asked a friend. She answered, "By thinking!"

... love is healing, even rootless love.

A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating - the brink of a voice and never a voice.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

a poet never feels useful.

About loving, I have little to learn from the young.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

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

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

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 all 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.

Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

Excellence costs a great deal.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing ...

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

Fire is a good companion for the mind ...

Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.

For after all we make our faces as we go along...

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.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

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?

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live ...

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.

have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.