May Sarton
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.Collection: Gardening
In the country of pain we are each alone.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Gardening
No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.Collection: Relationship
There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.Collection: Love
A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.Collection: Home
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.Collection: Communication
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.Collection: Communication
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.Collection: Alone
The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.Collection: Change
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
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 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.
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!
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... 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.Collection: Letting Go
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Spring
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.Collection: Age
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.Collection: Love
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 aboutCollection: Morning
It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.Collection: Believe
People who cannot feel punish those who do.Collection: People
Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.Collection: Silence
There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.Collection: Lying
Love is our human miracle.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Light
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.Collection: Taken
One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Letting Go
Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creationCollection: Revision
It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.Collection: Safety
It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.Collection: Ocean
What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?Collection: Healing
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?Collection: Art
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.Collection: Light
I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.Collection: Flower
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.Collection: Roles
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Crush
Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.Collection: Years
Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.Collection: Miracle
For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.Collection: Moral