• 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

  • We convert, if we do at all, by being something irresistible, not by demanding something impossible.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • The saint must not know he is a saint … he is far too busy thinking about other people. His preoccupations are not primarily with his own saintliness—not at all.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • When I was young death was a romantic dream, longed for at times of great emotional stress as one longs for sleep. Who could fear it? one asked at nineteen. We fear what we cannot imagine. There is simply no way of imagining what has not yet happened nor been described. We live toward it, not knowing … except that intense love of life has to be matched by greater detachment as one grows older.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • Scenes from a Marriage (1974)

  • He and Paul have won through to such a fertile and fertilizing relationship I almost envy it … and then I think of my solitude and realize again that I am truly married to it and without it would be even more nerve-racked and impossible than I am.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • Overeating makes people logy in a different way from the apathy induced by too little nourishment, but I feel sure that it takes the edge off perception. Many of us are literally weighed down.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton