May Sarton Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

I felt pain like an assault,
The old pain again
When the world thrusts itself inside,
When we have to take in the outside,
When we have to decide
To be the crazy-human with hope
Or just plain crazy
With fear.

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.

I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.