May Sarton

“A bolt that raised her heart to blazing heightAnd made the vertical the very thrust of hope,And found its path at last(Slow work of Grace).”

“If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?”

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

“The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.”

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”

“When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.”

“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.”

“...when the petals fallSay it is beautiful and good, say it is well”

“What does myself now say to me?"Open the door of Mystery.”

“In the country of pain we are each alone.”

“Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.”

“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.”

“The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.”

“In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.”

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

“There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.”

“And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.”

“I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.”

“True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.”

“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.”