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I Have Sometimes Wondered Also Whether In People Like Me Who Come To The Boil Fast (soupe Au Lait, The French Call This Trait, Like A Milk Soup That Boils Over) The Tantrum Is Not A Built-in Safety Valve Against Madness Or Illness. ... The Fierce Tension In Me, When It Is Properly Channeled, Creates The Good Tension For Work. But When It Becomes Unbalanced I Am Destructive. How To Isolate That Good Tension Is My Problem These Days. Or, Put In Another Way, How To Turn The Heat Down Fast Enough So The Soup Won't Boil Over!

-May Sarton

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I Have Sometimes Wondered

May Sarton

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I Have Sometimes Wondered Also Whether In People Like Me Who Come To The Boil Fast (soupe Au Lait, The French Call This Trait, Like A Milk Soup That Boils Over) The Tantrum Is Not A Built-in Safety Valve Against Madness Or Illness. ... The Fierce Tension In Me, When It Is Properly Channeled, Creates The Good Tension For Work. But When It Becomes Unbalanced I Am Destructive. How To Isolate That Good Tension Is My Problem These Days. Or, Put In Another Way, How To Turn The Heat Down Fast Enough So The Soup Won't Boil Over!

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Unexpected Gifts

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True Feeling Justifies Whatever It May Cost.

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Love Cannot Exorcise The Gifts Of Hate. / Hate Cannot Exorcize What Has No Weight, / But Laughter We Can Never Over-rate.

“how Does One Grow Up?” I Asked A Friend The Other Day. There Was A Slight Pause; Then She Answered, “by Thinking.”

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And I Refuse To Feel Guilty About Not Letter-writing Either. There Are Times When One Can, Times When One Can't. In The Times When An Enormous Amount Of Living Is Going On, One Can't.

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I Feel Often Very Close To The Ecstasy And Anguish Which Lie At The Very Heart Of Poetry - I Am Writing A Lot.

Being Very Rich As Far As I Am Concerned Is Having A Margin. The Margin Is Being Able To Give.

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We Have To Believe That Every Person Counts, Counts As A Creative Force That Can Move Mountains.

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We Cannot Afford Not To Fight For Growth And Understanding, Even When It Is Painful, As It Is Bound To Be.

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I Loved Them All The Way One Loves At Any Age -- If It's Real At All -- Obsessively, Painfully, With Wild Exultation, With Guilt, With Conflict; I Wrote Poems To And About Them, I Put Them Into Novels (disguised Of Course); I Brooded Upon Why They Were As They Were, So Often Maddening Don't You Know? I Wrote Them Ridiculous Letters. I Lived With Their Faces. I Knew Their Every Gesture By Heart. I Stalked Them Like Wild Animals. I Studied Them As If They Were Maps Of The World -- And In A Way I Suppose They Were.

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Absence Becomes The Greatest Presence.

Wrinkles Here And There Seem Unimportant Compared To The Gestalt Of The Whole Person I Have Become In This Past Year.

It Is The Privilege Of Those Who Fear Love To Murder Those Who Do Not Fear It!

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.

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Innocent Person

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Self Confidence

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Unless The Gentle Inherit The Earth, / There Will Be No Earth.

I Feel Happy To Be Keeping A Journal Again. I've Missed It, Missed Naming Things As They Appear, Missed The Half Hour When I Push All Duties Aside And Savor The Experience Of Being Alive In This Beautiful Place.

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Public Education Was Not Founded To Give Society What It Wants. Quite The Opposite.

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A House That Does Not Have One Warm, Comfy Chair In It Is Soulless.

I Have Written Every Poem, Every Novel, For The Same Purpose-to Find Out What I Think, To Know Where I Stand.

One Could Go On Revising A Prose Page Forever Whereas There Is A Point In A Poem When One Knows It Is Done Forever.

It Is Harder For Women, Perhaps To Be 'one-pointed,' Much Harder For Them To Clear Space Around Whatever It Is They Want To Do Beyond Household Chores And Family Life. Their Lives Are Fragmented... The Cry Not So Much For A 'a Room Of One's Own' As Time Of One's Own. Conflict Become Acute, Whatever It May Be About, When There Is No Margin Left On Any Day In Which To Try At Least To Resolve It.

Solitude Is One Thing And Loneliness Is Another.

People Are Always Talking About The Joys Of Youth-but, Oh, How Youth Can Suffer!

Mountains Define You. You Cannot Define / Them.

Keep Busy With Survival. Imitate The Trees. Learn To Lose In Order To Recover, And Remember Nothing Stays The Same For Long, Not Even Pain. Sit It Out. Let It All Pass. Let It Go.

Miracles Cannot Be Explained, That Is Their Miraculous Nature.

... Love Is Healing, Even Rootless Love.

I Suppose One Has To Remember That 'life' Is Important Too, Though It's Something I Forget In Some Moods, Everything Except Work Seeming Like An Interruption Or Really Non-life.

For Of Course One Is Never Safe When In Love. Growth Is Demanding And May Seem Dangerous, For There Is Loss As Well As Gain In Growth. But Why Go On Living If One Has Ceased To Grow? And What More Demanding Atmosphere For Growth Than Love In Any Form, Than Any Relationship Which Can Call Out And Requires Of Us Our Most Secret And Deepest Selves?

Why Is It That People Who Cannot Show Feeling Presume That That Is A Strength And Not A Weakness?

I Would Like To Believe When I Die That I Have Given Myself Away Like A Tree That Sows Seed Every Spring And Never Counts The Loss, Because It Is Not Loss, It Is Adding To Future Life. It Is The Tree's Way Of Being. Strongly Rooted Perhaps, But Spilling Out Its Treasure On The Wind.

Without Darkness, Nothing Comes To Birth, As Without Light, Nothing Flowers.

About Loving, I Have Little To Learn From The Young.

More Than Any Other Beauty (though It Is True Of All Beauty Except In Art) Passion Seems To Me To Have The Seeds Of Its Own Destruction In It.

There The Door Is Always Open Into The “holy” — Growth, Birth, Death.

There Were Moments ... When It Seemed That All One Could Be Asked Was Just To Keep The Ashtrays Clean, The Bed Made, The Wastebaskets Emptied, As If One Never Got To The Real Things Because Of The Constant Exhausting Battle To Keep Ordinary Life From Falling Apart.

Growing Old Is, Of All Things We Experience, That Which Takes The Most Courage, And At A Time When We Have The Least Resources, Especially With Which To Meet Frustration.

It Is Dangerous It Seems To Me For A Civilization When There Is A Complete Abyss Betewen People In General And The Artists. Or Is It Always So? The Poets Who Are Most Ardently On The People's Side Write In Such A Way That The People Cannot See Rhyme Nor Reason To Their Work.

If One Is The Kind Of Creature I Am And Wants To Do The Kind Of Writing I Want To Do, An Undisturbed Bourgeois Existence With No Distractions Seems In Order. A Single Meeting Outside The Family Upsets One's Whole Inner Web, Makes One Start Off On Two-days' Thinking And Weighing, Destroys A Delicate Balance Etc. Etc. ... I Now Have Enough Friends To Last Me A Lifetime And That Is Enough. I Am Going To Close The Doors And Hibernate At Least For A Couple Of Years. I Am Frightfully Depressed About My Work. It Seems To Me Perfectly Mediocre.

Nobody Stays Special When They're Old, Anna. That's What We Have To Learn.

What Frightens Me About America Today Is That In The Large Majority There Is No Active Sense Of The Value Of The Individual: Few Citizens Feel That They Are The Republic, Responsible For What Happens. And When The Individual In A Democracy Ceases To Feel His Importance, Then There Is Grave Danger That He Will Give Over His Freedom, If Not To A Fascist State, Then To The Advertising Men Or Publicity Agents Or To The Newspaper He Happens To Read.

[in Old Age] There Is A Childlike Innocence, Often, That Has Nothing To Do With The Childishness Of Senility. The Moments Become Precious . . .

People Who Cannot Feel Punish Those Who Do.

You Can't Plan For A Seizure Of Feeling, And For This Reason I Put Everything Else Aside When I'm Inspired.

The Price Of Being Oneself Is So High And Involves So Much Ruthlessness Toward Others (or What Looks Like Ruthlessness In Our Duty-bound Culture) That Very Few People Can Afford It.

Where Music Thundered Let The Mind Be Still, Where The Will Triumphed Let There Be No Will, What Light Revealed, Now Let The Dark Fulfill.

Death Does Frame A Person And Somehow It Is The Good That Stays.

Fire Is A Good Companion For The Mind.

He [the Cat] Wound Himself Around Her Legs, Purring The Purr Of Ardent Desire Like A Kettle Coming To A Boil And Then Bubbling Very Fast.

I Tell The Gods Are Still Alive / And They Are Not Consoling.

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.

Gardening Is An Instrument Of Grace.

The Garden Is Growth And Change And That Means Loss As Well As Constant New Treasures To Make Up For A Few Disasters.

It Is Dark Now. The Snow Is Deep Blue And The Ocean Nearly Black. It Is Time For Some Music.

True Gardeners Cannot Bear A Glove Between The Sure Touch And The Tender Root.

Real Joy Is Becoming Exceedingly Rare Among Artists Of Any Kind. And I Have An Idea That Those Who Can And Do Communicate It Are Always People Who Have Had A Hard Time. Then The Joy Has No Smugness Or Self-righteousness In It, Is Inclusive Not Exclusive, And Comes Close To Prayer.

Self-respect Is Nothing To Hide Behind. When You Need It Most It Isn't There.

Once More I Realize That Solitude Is My Element, And The Reason Is That Extreme Awareness Of Other People (all Naturally Solitary People Must Feel This) Precludes Awareness Of One's Self, So After A While The Self No Longer Knows That It Exists.

A Good Marriage Shuts Out A Very Great Deal.

Solitude Is My Element, And The Reason Is That Extreme Awareness Of Other People... Precludes Awareness Of One's Self So That After A While The Self No Longer Knows That It Exists.

There Is Only One Real Deprivation... And That Is Not To Be Able To Give One's Gifts To Those One Loves Most.

Revision Is Not Going Back And Fussing Around, But Going Forward Into The Process Of Creation

Instant Intimacy Was Too Often Followed By Disillusion.

I Always Forget How Important The Empty Days Are, How Important It May Be Sometimes Not To Expect To Produce Anything, Even A Few Lines In A Journal. A Day When One Has Not Pushed Oneself To The Limit Seems A Damaged Damaging Day, A Sinful Day. Not So! The Most Valuable Thing One Can Do For The Psyche, Occasionally, Is To Let It Rest, Wander, Live In The Changing Light Of A Room.

It Is, I Assume, Quite Easy To Wither Into Old Age, And Hard To Grow Into It.

Pain Can Make A Whole Winter Bright, Like Fever, Force Us To Live Deep And Hard.

Love Is Our Human Miracle.

I Am Realizing Once And For All The Difference As Far As I Am Concerned Of Women And Men And The Necessity For Both. With A Man, However Tender He Is, One Is Feeding Him - One Is Always And Eternally Understanding, Mothering, Supplying Him With Faith In Himself (not In You).

It Is The Place Of Renewal And Of Safety, Where For A Little While There Will Be No Harm Or Attack And, While Every Sense Is Nourished, The Soul Rests.

True Power Is Given To The Vulnerable.

We Have To Dare To Be Ourselves, However Frightening Or Strange That Self May Prove To Be.

It Is Possible, I Suppose, That We Are Returning To A Dark Age. What Is Frightening Is That Violence Is Not Only Represented By Nations, But Everywhere Walks Among Us Freely.

For Art Is Order, But It Is Born Out Of The Chaos Of Life.

I Simply Adore Being Alone - I Find It A Consuming Thirst - And When That Thirst Is Slaked, Then I Am Happy.

And One Cold Starry Night / Whatever Your Belief / The Phoenix Will Take Flight / Over The Seas Of Grief / To Sing Her Thrilling Song / To Stars And Waves And Sky / For Neither Old Nor Young / The Phoenix Does Not Die.

What Can I Have That I Still Want?

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Read Between The Lines.then Meet Me In The Silence If You Can.

Read Between The Lines

In The Country Of Pain We Are Each Alone.

How Much Hope, Expectation, And Sheer Hard Work Goes Into The Smallest Success! There Is No Being Sure Of Anything Except That Whatever Has Been Created Will Change In Time.

I See A Certain Order In The Universe And Math Is One Way Of Making It Visible.

I Love Giving Flowers. It Is So Deliciously Unlasting And Romantic.

Lunches Are Just Not Good. They Take The Heart Out Of The Day And The Spaciousness From The Morning's Work.

How Unnatural The Imposed View, Imposed By A Puritanical Ethos, That Passionate Love Belongs Only To The Young, That People Are Dead From The Neck Down By The Time They Are Forty, And That Any Deep Feeling, Any Passion After That Age, Is Either Ludicrous Or Revolting!

Women Are At Last Becoming Persons First And Wives Second, And That Is As It Should Be.

I Live Alone, Perhaps For No Good Reason, For The Reason That I Am An Impossible Creature, Set Apart By A Temperament I Have Never Learned To Use As It Could Be Used, Thrown Off By A Word, A Glance, A Rainy Day, Or One Drink Too Many. My Need To Be Alone Is Balanced Against My Fear Of What Will Happen When Suddenly I Enter The Huge Empty Silence If I Cannot Find Support There. I Go Up To Heaven And Down To Hell In An Hour, And Keep Alive Only By Imposing Upon Myself Inexorable Routines. I Write Too Many Letters And Too Few Poems.

A Poet Never Feels Useful.

Gardening Is A Madness, A Folly That Does Not Go Away With Age. Quite The Contrary.

It Is Good For A Professional To Be Reminded That His Professionalism Is Only A Husk, That The Real Person Must Remain An Amateur, A Lover Of The Work.

I Have Never Written A Book That Was Not Born Out Of A Question I Needed To Answer For Myself.

Without Anxiety Life Would Have Very Little Savor.

Poetry Finds Its Perilous Equilibrium Somewhere Between Music And Speech.

If Art Is Not To Be Life-enhancing, What Is It To Be?

Time Unbounded Is Hard To Handle.

I Suppose I Envy Painters Because They Can Meditate On Form And Structure, On Color And Light, And Not Concern Themselves With Human Torment And Chaos. It Is Restful Even To Imagine Expression Without Words.

No Partner In A Love Relationship... Should Feel That He Has To Give Up An Essential Part Of Himself To Make It Viable.

One Must Believe That Private Dilemmas Are, If Deeply Examined, Universal, And So, If Expressed, Have A Human Value Beyond The Private, And One Must Also Believe In The Vehicle For Expressing Them, In The Talent.

In The Very Long Run Any Success Devours - And Perhaps Also Corrupts.

Inside My Mother's Death / I Lay And Could Not Breathe.

Innocence Is Not Pure So Much As Pleased, Always Expectant, Bright-eyed, Self-enclosed

When It Comes To The Important Things One Is Always Alone.

Important Things

The Most Valuable Thing We Can Do For The Psyche, Occasionally, Is To Let It Rest, Wander, Live In The Changing Light Of Room, Not Try To Be Or Do Anything Whatever.

The Value Of Solitude - One Of Its Values - Is, Of Course, That There Is Nothing To Cushion Against Attacks From Within, Just As There Is Nothing To Help Balance At Times Of Particular Stress Or Depression.

Where Joy In An Old Pencil Is Not Absurd.

O Cruel Cloudless Space, And Pale Bare Ground Where The Poor Infant Lies! Why Do We Feel Restored As In A Sacramental Place? Here Mystery Is Artifice, And Here A Vision Of Such Peace Is Stored, Healing Flows From It Through Our Eyes.

One Does Not "find Oneself" By Pursuing One's Self, But On The Contrary By Pursuing Something Else And Learning Through Discipline Or Routine. . . Who One Is And Wants To Be.

They Are Commiting Murder Who Merely Live.

My Musical Genius Reached Its Apex Thirty Years Ago When I Played The Triangle In Haydn's Children's Symphony, So I Could Not Play Unless You Needed Someone To Make One Sustained Note!

I Want Feelings To Be Expressed, To Be Open, To Be Natural, Not To Be Looked On As Strange. It's Not Weird If You Feel Deeply.

The Beginner Hugs His Infant Poem To Him And Does Not Want It To Grow Up. But You May Have To Break Your Poem To Remake It.

It Is A Waste Of Time To See People Who Have Only A Social Surface To Show. I Will Make Every Effort To Find Out The Real Person, But If I Can't, Then I Am Upset And Cross. Time Wasted Is Poison.

We Are Never Done With Thinking About Our Parents, I Suppose, And Come To Know Them Better Long After They Are Dead Than We Ever Did When They Were Alive.

If I Were To Choose One Single Thing That That Would Restore Paris To The Senses, It Would Be That Strangely Sweet, Unhealthy Smell Of The Métro, So Very Unlike The Dank Cold Or The Stuffy Heat Of Subways In New York.

The Ambience Here Is Order And Beauty. That Is What Frightens Me When I Am First Alone Again. I Feel Inadequate. I Have Made An Open Place, A Place For Meditation. What If I Cannot Find Myself Inside It?

It Is Always Hard To Hear The Buried Truth From Another Person.

One Of The Springs Of Poetry Is Joy.

For After All We Make Our Faces As We Go Along.

My Own Feeling Is That The Only Possible Reason For Engaging In The Hard Labor Of Writing A Novel, Is That One Is Bothered By Something One Needs To Understand, And Can Come To Understand Only Through The Characters In The Imagined Situation.

What Is Destructive Is Impatience, Haste, Expecting Too Much Too Fast.

I Think Of The Trees And How Simply They Let Go, Let Fall The Riches Of A Season, How Without Grief (it Seems) They Can Let Go And Go Deep Into Their Roots For Renewal And Sleep.... Imitate The Trees. Learn To Lose In Order To Recover, And Remember That Nothing Stays The Same For Long, Not Even Pain, Psychic Pain. Sit It Out. Let It All Pass. Let It Go.

Deep Down There Was Understanding, Not Of The Facts Of Our Lives So Much As Of Our Essential Natures.

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.

Do We Always Make Our Freedom Out Of Someone Else's Bondage?

Most People Have To Talk So They Won't Hear.

Don't Forget That Compared To A Grownup Person Every Baby Is A Genius.

The Minute One Utters A Certainty, The Opposite Comes To Mind.

A Great Silence Has Descended On Me For The Last Six Months. I Am As Silent As An Arab In The Desert, As Dry, Thirsty, And Full Of Wonder And Rumours Which Do Not Materialize Into Camels Or Travellers At All, But Just Vanish Into The Silent Spaces From Where They Came. I Expect This Is A Good Thing Though It Is Extremely Irritating - The Brink Of A Voice And Never A Voice.

Letters Are So Much Easier Than Living. One Can Give One's Best.

At Some Point I Believe One Has To Stop Holding Back For Fear Of Alienating Some Imaginary Reader Or Real Relative Or Friend, And Come Out With Personal Truth.

Words Are My Passion / And Out Of Them And Me / I Would Create Beauty.

It Is Sometimes The Most Fragile Things That Have The Power To Endure And Become Sources Of Strength.

The Trouble Is, Old Age Is Not Interesting Until One Gets There. It's A Foreign Country With An Unknown Language To The Young And Even To The Middle-aged.

Fighting Dragons Is My Holy Joy.

The Woman Who Needs To Create Works Of Art Is Born With A Kind Of Psychic Tension In Her Which Drives Her Unmercifully To Find A Way To Balance, To Make Herself Whole. Every Human Being Has This Need: In The Artist It Is Mandatory. Unable To Fulfill It, He Goes Mad. But When The Artist Is A Woman She Fulfills It At The Expense Of Herself As A Woman.

The Poet Must Be Free To Love Or Hate As The Spirit Moves Him, Free To Change, Free To Be A Chameleon, Free To Be An Enfant Terrible. He Must Above All Never Worry About This Effect On Other People.

Light Is Snow Sifted / To An Abstraction.

Do Not Deprive Me Of My Age. I Have Earned It.

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Annabella Sciorra

Michael Johnson

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