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The House by the Sea QUOTES

The House by the Sea QUOTES

1 " it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence—nature, the arts, human love. "

― May Sarton , The House by the Sea

2 " Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person "

― May Sarton , The House by the Sea

3 " 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. "

― May Sarton , The House by the Sea

4 " Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little. I thought of this when reading yesterday the review of Leslie Farber’s new book by Anatole Broyard in the Times. A. B.’s first two paragraphs are as follows: “ ‘The attempt of the will to do the work of the imagination:’ W. B. Yeats applied this phrase to an incorrect approach to life. Ours, he says, is the age of the disordered will. It is our conceit that no human possibility is beyond our conscious will. T.S. Eliot had something similar in mind when he said that the bad poet is conscious when he should be unconscious and unconscious when he should be conscious. “Trying to will what cannot be willed, according to Mr. Farber, brings on anxiety, and this anxiety, in turn, cripples our other faculties so that we are left with nothing but anxiety about anxiety, a double unease. Among the things we try to will are happiness, creativity, love, sex, and immortality. "

― May Sarton , The House by the Sea

5 " 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. Most people swallow the unacceptable because it makes life so much easier. At what point does one feel that doing battle, however painful and rending, is necessary? "

― May Sarton , The House by the Sea