May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude (1973)

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I 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 Sarton
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

May Sarton
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

May Sarton
No partner in a love relationship (whether homo- or heterosexual) should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

May Sarton
How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

May Sarton
I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

May Sarton
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.

May Sarton
I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become.... But there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

May Sarton
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

May Sarton
When it comes to the important things one is always alone.

May Sarton
I 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 Sarton
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 Sarton
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.

May Sarton
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

May Sarton
We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

May Sarton
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?

May Sarton
Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

May Sarton
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

May Sarton
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

May Sarton
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

May Sarton