408 Quotes by May Sarton

It’s extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other – there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

A garden is a perpetual experiment. It may evoke, but it can rarely memorialize, at least in the sense of imitation. Gardens are as original as people.

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

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal – and these balances are shifting all the time.

I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It’s not weird if you feel deeply.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best – out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

I’ve been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It’s not that, it’s a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn’t there.

For a Fur Person is a cat whom human beings love in the right way, allowing him to keep his dignity, his reserve and his freedom. And a Fur Person is a cat who has come to love one or, in very exceptional cases, two human beings and who has decided to stay with them as long as he lives. This can only happen if the human being has imagined part of himself into a cat just as the cat has imagined part of himself into a human being. It is a mutual exchange.