Top 100 May Sarton Quotes
#1. It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
May Sarton
#2. You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
May Sarton
#3. For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
#4. When the petals fall
Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well
May Sarton
#5. You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
May Sarton
#6. Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
#7. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
May Sarton
#8. When I am working I immediately feel hopeful.
May Sarton
#9. Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
May Sarton
#10. Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost - Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends.
May Sarton
#11. KAIROS A unique time in a person's life; an opportunity for change.
May Sarton
#12. We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
May Sarton
#13. A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
#14. Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.
May Sarton
#15. Gardening is the instrument of grace.
May Sarton
#16. I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
May Sarton
#17. When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.
May Sarton
#18. For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.
May Sarton
#19. Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?
May Sarton
#20. Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
#21. Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have ... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!
May Sarton
#22. All great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
May Sarton
#23. Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
#24. I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.
May Sarton
#25. Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.
May Sarton
#26. Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
May Sarton
#27. It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person ...
May Sarton
#28. Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton
#29. Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
#30. In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing
the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
May Sarton
#31. We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
May Sarton
#32. I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.
May Sarton
#33. 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.
May Sarton
#34. For only the ill are well,
Only the hunted, free
May Sarton
#35. Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
#36. 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.
May Sarton
#37. O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice,
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes.
May Sarton
#38. I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.
May Sarton
#40. A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.
May Sarton
#41. Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.
May Sarton
#42. 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.
May Sarton
#43. The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
May Sarton
#44. I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people ...
May Sarton
#45. So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.
May Sarton
#46. Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.
May Sarton
#47. It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
May Sarton
#48. Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.
May Sarton
#49. Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.
May Sarton
#50. Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.
May Sarton
#51. Your poems will happen when no one is there.
May Sarton
#52. I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
May Sarton
#53. But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.
May Sarton
#54. How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time ...
May Sarton
#55. I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.
May Sarton
#56. In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton
#57. Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.
May Sarton
#58. In the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.
May Sarton
#59. I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
May Sarton
#60. Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.
May Sarton
#61. Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
#62. And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.
May Sarton
#63. How slowly one comes to understand anything!
May Sarton
#64. I'm only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
May Sarton
#65. What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?
May Sarton
#66. We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.
May Sarton
#67. For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.
May Sarton
#68. In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life.
May Sarton
#69. Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May Sarton
#70. A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.
May Sarton
#71. How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!
May Sarton
#72. Still, a person who cannot express love is stopping the flow of life, is censoring where censorship is a form of self-indulgence, the fear of giving oneself away.
May Sarton
#73. People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
May Sarton
#74. Over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?
May Sarton
#75. It is alarming to feel the soul
Leap to the surface and find no sheltering wall.
May Sarton
#76. Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
May Sarton
#77. In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
May Sarton
#78. One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine ... who one is and wants to be.
May Sarton
#79. What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
#80. Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed
May Sarton
#82. It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
May Sarton
#83. A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
#84. Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
May Sarton
#85. The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
May Sarton
#86. Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
#87. Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?
May Sarton
#88. Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
May Sarton
#89. The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.
May Sarton
#90. Fire is a good companion for the mind ...
May Sarton
#91. Schubert Impromptus that Louise Bogan gave me - Opus 90 and Opus 142, Gieseking.
May Sarton
#92. Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.
May Sarton
#93. 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.
May Sarton
#94. Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech ...
May Sarton
#95. in Sante Fe time is not that shallow. There one can go deep into a continuity as the pueblos and the culture they represent take one back at least eight hundred years through a single Indian dance. For a European that continuity is life-giving.
May Sarton
#96. No partner in a love relationship ... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
May Sarton
#97. In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.
May Sarton
#98. We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.
May Sarton
#99. It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.
May Sarton
#100. I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
May Sarton
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