May Sarton Quotes

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

Never underestimate what it takes to watch someone you love in pain.

All the great things that I get to be curious about, see, and experience because I'm sensitive to the world, it also opens up these areas where there's a lot of pain and suffering. You're just aware, aware, aware.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

I realized that a great deal of life is exactly and precisely about being able to feel pain: my own and other people's.

The world is always ending for someone. It’s a good line. I give it to the father of the child. He says it to his wife. ‘The world is always ending for someone,’ he says. She is trying to quieten the baby, and does not hear him. I doubt that it would matter if she did.

Pain? He could handle that, no problem; it was the idea that the female he loved was suffering that made him want to either punch something or vomit in the corner.

Life is full of painful events, and people who have lost their way and hurt others. Our pain is not lessened when we respond with hatred. In fact, the opposite occurs: When we hate people who hurt us, we come to resemble what we hate, or worse, and then we suffer all the more. What is evil is our response. We have choices, and love is the most powerful eliminator of all.

It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless.

However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.

Pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!

I couldn't tell you why she felt that way but she felt it everyday. I couldn't help her; I just watched her make the same mistakes again.

All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartednes s. Once we recognize this we will be more inclined to cultivate it.

To hurt is as human as to breathe.

Heartbreak makes us stronger; it's an opportunity for spiritual growth. How can you understand someone else's pain if you have not yourself suffered?

To become a man was something, but to become a man of sorrows was far more; to bleed, and die, and suffer.

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.

I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.

He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.

People are hurting. People are suffering. But you can not get everywhere.

By remembering that I don't know sadness or pain like the people do in the camp and to be sad will not help them.

It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

Here let me sit in sorrow for mankind.