May Sarton
The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?Collection: Beauty
when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.Collection: Hopeful
Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?Collection: Bondage
A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.Collection: Good Marriage
I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.Collection: Friendship
For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?Collection: Loss
Excellence costs a great deal.Collection: Excellence
...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.Collection: Sex
Time spent with poets is never wasted.Collection: Poet
What can I have that I still want?Collection: Want
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.Collection: Writing
Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.Collection: Mountain
Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.Collection: Teaching
Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.Collection: Doe
each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.Collection: Energy
The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.Collection: People
I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.Collection: Men
For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".Collection: Self
This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.Collection: Travel
I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.Collection: Children
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?Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Strong
I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).Collection: Men
I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.Collection: Passion
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.Collection: Forever