May Sarton

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

“No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.”

“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!”

“A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.”

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

“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.”

“True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.”

“I am not ready to die, But I am learning to trust death As I have trusted life. I am moving Toward a new freedom”

“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?”

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

“Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.”

“Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?”

“Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.”

“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.”