The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
May SartonIt is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
May SartonA man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.
May SartonHe [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.
May SartonThere are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.
May SartonI suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.
May SartonI have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!
May SartonThe only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.
May SartonThere were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
May SartonKeep 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.
May SartonThis 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.
May SartonThere 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. . . .
May SartonThe hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.
May SartonI have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May SartonThere is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May SartonI can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sartonwe are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
May SartonDoes 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.
May SartonLunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May SartonMy musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!
May SartonDeep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.
May SartonI asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
May SartonI feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.
May SartonI am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.
May SartonMay 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.
May SartonOne could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
May SartonIn the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
May SartonI sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
May SartonIt is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
May SartonIt always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
May SartonFailure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
May SartonThe trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.
May Sarton