May Sarton Quotes

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

I'm searching, as we all are, for ways to feel good about myself. Certainly, looking in the mirror doesn't do it!

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

I don't get along much with myself.

I feel like 2013 was one giant snowball of me being confused with my place in life and within the group. A lot of it was self-confidence issues, a lot of outside issues, and a lot of me questioning the future of what I was doing. And my mistake was letting all that influence me so that I wasn't the best I could be in life!

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are.

I'd like to lose interest in myself.

If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself?

All my life I've been dogged by guilt because I feel there is this difference between the way I look and the way I feel inside.

I'm a horrible person. And it's just coming out in my work.

God, I'm glad I'm not me.

Sometimes I'm so deeply buried under self-reproaches that I long for a word of comfort to help me dig myself out again.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

The name, his true name, was weaker and more flawed than he would have liked, and he hated himself for that, but there was also much to admire within it, and the more he thought about it, the more he was able to accept the true nature of his self. He was not the best person in the world, but neither was he the worst.

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

After all, conflict arises, does it not, through the desire to be something, to be other than what is.

...self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy.