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May Sarton

May Sarton Quotes

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Famous May Sarton Quotes

“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'?”

WomenCreativityGenderWritersFemininityMasculine Feminine
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“It is harder than it used to be because standards of housekeeping and house-decorating have become pretentious and competitive. I don’t blame children for fleeing those House Beautiful houses, nonshelters, dehumanized, ostentatious, rarely expressing an individual family’s way of life. When I was writing a column for Family Circle I had planned one in praise of shabbiness. A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless. It all comes back to the fact that we're not asked to be perfect, only human. What a relief it is to walk into a human house!”

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Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep ... 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.”

PainSufferingNatureChangeLossGriefLetting GoSurvivalTreesRenewal
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".”

SolitudeIntrospectionWriting Life
Author:May Sarton
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“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.”

LoveSexGrowthRelationships
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots? I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.”

WritingWriting LifeMay Sarton
Book:Plant Dreaming Deep
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“Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.”

ThinkingWayHumansHas BeensMatterEnoughPainJoyHumanityForceCausesHuman BeingsDrawsHappeningsConnectionsSignificantJoy HappinessEnough Pain
Book:Recovering: A Journal
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“Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!”

IfsShareMinesBasesPermanentPositivelyRichnessArdentNature Love
Book:The Journals of May Sarton Volume One: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and Recovering
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“If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

IfsKnowsHumansSelfFeelingsActionJoyArtistHumanityHuman BeingsAcceptingDoubtConditionsCreationWillingCapacityGuiltNakedComplexityHuman ConditionExtravaganceSelf-doubt
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.”

PeopleKindIdeasRealSelfHardJoyArtistPrayerBecomingCommunicateHard TimesRighteousnessExclusiveSelf RighteousnessReal JoySmugness
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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