Quotes by May Sarton

We must dare to be ourselves,
no matter how odd that self may prove to be.

Keep 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. 

The values of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.  A few moments of desultory conversation...may calm an inner storm.  But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it.  So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.  The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

Instant success is the order of the day; "I want it now!"  I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines.  Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life...so the few things that we still do...anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

The anguish of my life here - its rages - is hardly mentioned...There is violence there and anger never resolved.  I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word,a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many.  My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there.  I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines...It may be outwardly silent here but in the back of my mind is a clamor of human voices, too many needs, hopes and fear.  I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the "undone"...

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.  But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see.  I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go"...

The ambience here is order and beauty.  That is what frightens me when I am first alone again.  I feel inadequate.  I have made an open place, a place for meditation.  What if I cannot find myself inside it?

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them.  They are felt as presences.  Without them I would die...they change before my eyes.  They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying.  I am floated on their moments.

"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."

- May Sarton Journal of a Solitude