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As We Are Now QUOTES

As We Are Now QUOTES

1 " Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

2 " What I long for with a deep ache inside me is sacred music. I long for the Fauré Requiem, for the Haydn “Mass in Time of War,” for some pure celestial music that could lift me above myself, into that sphere where great art lives, beyond what man can be in himself, the intimation of the sacred—what cannot be dirtied or smudged by wickedness or by anger, which no threat can touch. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

3 " Old age is really a disguise that no one but the old themselves see through. I feel exactly as I always did, as young inside as when I was twenty-one, but the outward shell conceals the real me—sometimes even from itself—and betrays that person deep down inside, under wrinkles and liver spots and all the horrors of decay. I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on. But "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

4 " My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a “symptom”? There "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

5 " a hand (Standish’s are ice cold) and "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

6 " The trouble is that old age is not interesting until one gets there, a foreign country with an unknown language to the young, and even to the middle-aged. I "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

7 " The point is that I loved math with a passion. I loved the order, the clarity of it, the absolute in it. And I think that my students felt that, for me, something more than mere math was involved, an attitude toward life itself. I liked a straight answer to a straight question, in just the way that I felt the beauty of a perfect equation or, even more, a geometric figure. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

8 " A teacher cannot become too human or too vulnerable, or he ceases to be the rock every young person needs. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

9 " What I am getting at is that in a place like this where we are deprived of so much already, the small things that delight the senses - food, a soft blanket, a percale sheet and pillow case, a bottle of lavender cologne, a linen handkerchief seem necessities if one is to survive. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

10 " The true nature of a person is communicated as much, perhaps even more, by touch than by the look in his eyes. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

11 " He is rather an elegant creature and I enjoy looking at him. He pleases me as a man and as a human being. Brilliance, intellectually speaking, is not required of the ministry, but integrity is. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

12 " Quite often I can get real music on the transistor radio in the evenings. It makes what used to be long hours after Anna has gone home a time of marvels. I marvel that such beauty flows in through my ears, unheard by anyone else. What a miracle! "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

13 " if people know nothing about love they will always make it into a sexual matter. The limit of what I longed for with X was simply to lie down somewhere beside her and to hold her hand - Why that? Because words were not a possible means of deep exchange between us, because I longed so to rest in her, to believe too that she might rest in me. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now

14 " I believe we are forgiven at the instant of asking forgiveness, for asking forgiveness is an act of faith. It places the soul in eternity. "

― May Sarton , As We Are Now