MAY SARTON

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

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.

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!

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

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.

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.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

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

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.