a bit of May Sarton

some interesting quotes from her book "Journal of a Solitude":

“Found this in an old journal of mine – Humphrey Trevelyan on Goethe: ‘It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative to the end of a long life, he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent, never be content with life, must always demand the impossible and when he cannot have it, must despair. The burden of the mystery must be with him day and night. He must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontentment, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. Many lesser poets have it only in their youth; some even of the greatest lose it in middle life. Wordsworth lost the courage to despair and with it his poetic power. But more often the dynamic tensions are so powerful that they destroy the man before he reaches maturity.’”

“My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life – all of it – flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And 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. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

“I have been thinking about the fact that, however terrible the storms may be, if one’s life has a sufficiently stable and fruitful structure, one is helped to withstand their devastating aftereffects. For most people their job does this-provides a saving routine in time of stress. I have to create my own to survive.”

“The human mistakes I make often come from rushing in fast in order to be “done” with something, to have answered, to get it off the desk…or not selectively enough. Whatever people I take into my life I take in because they challenge me and I challenge them at the deepest level. Such relationships are rarely serene, but they are nourishing.”

“…every artist is androgynous, that it is the masculine in a woman and the feminine in a man that proves creative.”

“I have been helped by Jung’s insights into the necessity for suffering. Sometimes I wonder whether what is often wrong with intimate human relations is not recognizing this. We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth. And growth does not cease to be painful at any age.”

The next one is nicked from Loneliness by Clark E. Moustakas but as quoted in Journal of A Solitude:

“I began to see that loneliness is neither good nor bad, but a point of intense and timeless awareness of the Self, a beginning which initiates totally new sensitivities and awarenesses, and which results in bringing a person deeply in touch with his own