May Sarton - Quodid

About

Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995), known by the pen name May Sarton, was a Belgian and American novelist, poet, and memoirist. Notably, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her writing in 1965, a time when it was highly unusual to do so.

Quotes from May Sarton

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

listening speech talking hearing

Love opens the doors into everything… including, and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

suffering awarenss

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

humanity heroism decency behavior

Joy, happiness… we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections,… to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness, to some extent, isolates.

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

My home is not a place, it is people.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help.

patience nature

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