May Sarton quotes - page 2

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison. (May Sarton)
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite. View quote
May Sarton
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers. View quote
May Sarton
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 bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on. View quote
May Sarton
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it. View quote
May Sarton
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. View quote
May Sarton
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated. View quote
May Sarton
Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places. View quote
May Sarton
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. View quote
May Sarton
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? View quote
May Sarton
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. (May Sarton)
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love. View quote
May Sarton
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. View quote
May Sarton
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. View quote
May Sarton
I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it. View quote
May Sarton
We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers. View quote
May Sarton
In the garden the door is always open into the 'holy' - growth, birth, death. 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. View quote
May Sarton
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. View quote
May Sarton
For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable. View quote
May Sarton
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time. View quote
May Sarton
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. (May Sarton)
When it comes to the important things one is always alone. View quote
May Sarton
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward, to reset oneself by an inner compass. View quote
May Sarton
It always comes to the same necessity go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. View quote
May Sarton