FridayJan 09, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
May Sarton (May 3, 1912-July 16, 1995) was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist born in Wondelgem, Belgium. Many of her novels and poems are pellucid reflections of the lesbian experience.
In the country of pain we are each alone.
We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.
It always comes to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
In the garden the door is always open into the 'holy' - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
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.
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward, to reset oneself by an inner compass.
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
No partner in a love relationship should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
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