“Once as I looked up I saw a big, pure drop of rain slip from leaf to leaf of a clematis vine. The thought occurred to me that it was just such quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things that poets and other observers jot down in their note-books.”

Wallace Stevens

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“The ash has lost its leaves and when I went out to get the mail and stopped to look up at it, I rejoiced to think that soon everything here will be honed down to structure. It is all a rich farewell now to leaves, to color. 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.”

May Sarton

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“One day when I got home at Fourteen Wright Street, Judy opened the door and looked so stricken that I said, ‘Judy, what’s happened? Has Tom Jones died?’ That was our cat. She said, ‘No, but Volta Hall has had a heart attack and died.’ I suppose this is one of the most terrifying blows life has to offer: when your psychiatrist disappears. Within the next two days I wrote an elegy for Volta Hall which is in the Collected Poems and in which the repeated line is, ‘Now the long lucid listening is done.’ I sent this to his widow with a bunch of violets. There was no reply. I thought perhaps there is an unwritten rule that the wife of a psychiatrist does not make contact with a patient even after he himself has died. So I thought no more about it. About ten years later I had a note from her asking if she could come to see me. She came and told me that I would never know what that poem had meant, that she could give it to her children so they could see what her husband and their father had been for so many patients and what he was in himself. She also came—and this touched me deeply—to ask my blessing on her remarriage, as though I was speaking, in a way, for Volta. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘that’s what he would want.’
        You never know, when you send out a bird with an olive branch in its beak, whether it will come back or not.”

May Sarton

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“Keep busy with survival. 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.”

May Sarton

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“Let it all begin once more, the step-by-step joyful effort to lift a poem out.”

May Sarton

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“Ordering seeds is my reward for finishing the income-tax figures.”

May Sarton

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“Found three huge mushrooms when I went out before breakfast to fill the bird feeder. So far only jays come, but the word will get around.”

May Sarton

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“The most hopeful sign, the only one, in these hard times is how much individual initiative manages to make its way up through the asphalt, so many tough shoots of human imagination.”

May Sarton

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“This book is not a journal; it is an exercise-book, a disorderly pile of shavings.”

Alfred Kazin

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“Why I miss the trolley cars. Because unlike everything and everybody else in the U.S. they did not swerve from their ancient path. And because as a boy (thousands of years ago) I went to Coney Island in a trolley car, and saw grass growing between the tracks and because it was an open trolley, with the conductor on the side hopping from row to row to collect his fares (his left arm holding the rail as he hopped) and because it seemed to me then (as does not happen now on the bus) that the other passengers were all my family, all Brooklyn. And because as we neared the sea, and could see its blue glare on the surface, everyone (at least in the back row) burst out singing.”

Alfred Kazin

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“We moved today to 415 Central Park West. Enormous business of packing and unpacking my books, which I have been carrying on my back for so many years. Lord, how I would like to get free of all these things sometime. I date my maturity from the day I realized there were books I could get along without.”

Alfred Kazin

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“I have confidence in the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Beware of a writer quoting too much; he may be quoting all he knows.”

Alfred Kazin

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“I cannot get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. I retreat & hide. I left the city, I hid myself in the pastures. When I bought a house, the first thing I did was to plant trees. I could not conceal myself enough. Set a hedge here, set pines there, trees & trees, set evergreens, above all, for they will keep my secret all year round.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Do not be too timid & squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. What if they are a little coarse, & you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, & get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never more be so afraid of a tumble.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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