May Sarton
I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.Collection: Book
About loving, I have little to learn from the young.Collection: Littles
in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.Collection: Success
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.Collection: Life
I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.Collection: Life And Death
Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.Collection: Earth
It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.Collection: Dark
You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.Collection: Inspiration
I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.Collection: Christmas
For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.Collection: Art
life is always bringing unexpected gifts.Collection: Unexpected Gifts
I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.Collection: Expression
The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.Collection: Giving
When it comes to the important things one is always alone.Collection: Important
The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.Collection: Stress
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.Collection: Believe
Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.Collection: Passion
Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.Collection: Pain
Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.Collection: Failure
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.Collection: Past
I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... 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!Collection: Anger
Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.Collection: Solitude
all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.Collection: Dream
It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?Collection: Looks
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.Collection: Joy
How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!Collection: Passion
You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.Collection: Long
What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.Collection: Ambition
An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.Collection: Sex
I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.Collection: Light
He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.Collection: Cat
I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.Collection: Writing
Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?Collection: Tragedy
I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.Collection: Writing
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Real
Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.Collection: Life
We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.Collection: Fighting
Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.Collection: Real
instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.Collection: Intimacy
Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.Collection: Self
If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Letting Go
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.Collection: Essence
I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.Collection: Want
Fire is a good companion for the mind.Collection: Fire
It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.Collection: Real
I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It's not weird if you feel deeply.Collection: Feelings
I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.Collection: Writing