• He who hates himself is not humble.

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

    Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
    Anne Lamott

  • He had achieved nothing. He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • Everything had left her—the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • “A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • Because I am thinking so much about the past these days I have come to see that the past is always changing, is never static, never “placed” forever like a book on a shelf. As we grow and change, we understand things and the people who have influenced us in new ways.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • It’s not that I want to die myself, Heaven knows, but the basic pattern of a life changes radically when there is no one left, for instance, who remembers one as a child.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • “Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. “If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.”

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • “I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone.”

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • There are compensations for not being in love—solitude grows richer for me every year. It is not a matter of being a recluse … I shall never be that; I enjoy and need my friends too much.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton