May Sarton Quotes - Page 7

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

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

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

When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.

It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

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.

Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.

We only keep what we lose.

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .