Quotes by May Sarton

• The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
• Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
• Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
• We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
• The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
• The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
• Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
• It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
• There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
• In the country of pain we are each alone.
• One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
• Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
• 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.
• Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
• No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
• In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
• Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
• A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
• 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!
• Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
• Just as a diamond is formed under pressure, so too are we shaped by life's challenges and adversities.