Quotes by 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 all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiti...”

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

“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.”

“I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom”

“The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.”

“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 sa...”

“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.”

“I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.”

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

“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 le...”

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

“So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.”

“But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.”

“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 s...”

“When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (ga...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 ...”