Quotes by May Sarton

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

“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.”

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

“There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give ones gifts to those one loves most.”

“Though friendship is not quick to burn,It is explosive stuff.”

“Dont 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!”

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

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

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 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

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what youre feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what youre reading.

I feel more alive when Im writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when Im making love.

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

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

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?

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 (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

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 learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of womens creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as irrelevant?

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.