408 Quotes by May Sarton

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 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".

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

I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.

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

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

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?

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

Friendship supplied the root--It was planted years ago--To bring me flowers and seedThrough the long drought