May Sarton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by May Sarton

May Sarton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from May Sarton on Wise Famous Quotes.

What can I have that I still want?

How does one grow up?" I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, "By thinking.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

When I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

Life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

What does myself now say to me?
Open the door of Mystery.

Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable

When grace is given it comes to us as joy, maybe, but it can also be earned, I am convinced, through the rigorous examination of the sources of pain.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

Where music thundered let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed let there be no will,
What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

How slowly one comes to understand anything!

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

One of the springs of poetry is joy ...

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live ...

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person ...

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.

There is only one real deprivation ... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

Time unbounded is hard to handle.

"How does one grow up?" I asked a friend. She answered, "By thinking!"

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe ...

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life.

When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

Poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech ...

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

Love is our human miracle.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.

She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.

I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

True power is given to the vulnerable.

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

For after all we make our faces as we go along...

We have to break the mirror to be ourselves...

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.

Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

When it comes to the important things one is always alone ...

All great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

For only the ill are well,
Only the hunted, free

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.

You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.

Schubert Impromptus that Louise Bogan gave me - Opus 90 and Opus 142, Gieseking.

Making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

No partner in a love relationship ... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.

The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious ...

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.