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.

— May Sarton

May Sarton Quotes

The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won’t boil over!

— May Sarton

To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive.

— May Sarton

Self-reliance? Yes, but that first spring I had to learn dependency too. By crying for help and seeing help come from several directions, I began to learn what the village is all about: on the one hand, respect for privacy, and on the other, awareness of each other’s needs. So, however solitary some of us may look to an outsider, we are in truth part of an invisible web and supported by its presence.

— May Sarton

A garden is a perpetual experiment. It may evoke, but it can rarely memorialize, at least in the sense of imitation. Gardens are as original as people.

— May Sarton

We can accept death. It is the dying that is not and never will be acceptable. For us who have to witness dying, it must always feel as if the very fabric of life were being torn apart.

— May Sarton

All aspiring writers say these things: “I will not compromise and write a best seller!“ – as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.

— May Sarton

Adventures may be for the adventurous, but home is where the real things are sown and reaped, where in the end the real things happen. They.

— May Sarton

Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.

— May Sarton

My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a “symptom”? There.

— May Sarton

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being is detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless, always lays some burden on the other person.

— May Sarton

Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.

— May Sarton

There is really only one possible prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence.

— May Sarton

We go up to Heaven and down to Hell a dozen times a day.

— May Sarton

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gifts to those one loves most.

— May Sarton

I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within. People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.

— May Sarton

Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

— May Sarton

I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the silt – unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.

— May Sarton

The delights of the poet as I jotted them down turned out to be light, solitude, the natural world, love, time, creation itself. Suddenly after the months of depression I am fully alive in all these areas, and awake.

— May Sarton

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

The roots of love need watering or it dies.

— May Sarton
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