A biography for May Sartonhasn’t been written yet.
“Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.”
“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.”
“...The means of choice:She might choose to ascendThe falling dream,By some angelic power without a nameReverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,Know height without an end,Density melt to air, silence yield a voice--Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace.”
“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?”
“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”
“Most people have to talk so they won't hear.”
“But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.”
“Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.”
“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.”
“Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.”
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”
“A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.”
“It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!”
“Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.”
“So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.”
“No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.”
“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”
“It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.”
“The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.”
“Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!”