May Sarton
It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.Collection: Hurt
We only keep what we lose.Collection: Loss
Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.Collection: Best Friend
At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .Collection: Able
The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.Collection: Compassion
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.Collection: Country
People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!Collection: Talking
Fighting dragons is my holy joy.Collection: Fighting
Gardening is the instrument of grace.Collection: Grace
I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.Collection: God
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.Collection: Holiday
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.Collection: Prayer
I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.Collection: Flower
I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.Collection: Autumn
Gardening is an instrument of grace.Collection: Grace
letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.Collection: Giving
How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.Collection: Hard Work
I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.Collection: Dream
Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.Collection: Mother
So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.Collection: Blood
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.Collection: Morning
Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?Collection: Laughter
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.Collection: War
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.Collection: Poverty
There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.Collection: Real
I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.Collection: Math
[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .Collection: Age
When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.Collection: Moving
More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.Collection: Art
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.Collection: Routine
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.Collection: Innocent Person
The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.Collection: Growing Up
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.Collection: Loneliness
I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.Collection: Lying
My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!Collection: Children
It feels a long way up and down from zero.Collection: Zero
Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.Collection: Giving
There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.Collection: Garden
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.Collection: Self Confidence
Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.Collection: Frustration
If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.Collection: Sweet
We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.Collection: Patience
Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!Collection: Share
I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.Collection: Happiness
Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.Collection: Inspiring
gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.Collection: Gardening
For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.Collection: Angel