May Sarton Quotes

199 Sourced Quotes

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

May Sarton

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

May Sarton

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

May Sarton

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

May Sarton

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best – out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

May Sarton

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

May Sarton

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

May Sarton

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.

May Sarton

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root.

May Sarton

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

May Sarton

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

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.

May Sarton

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

May Sarton

Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.

May Sarton

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

May Sarton

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? 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

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

Letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

May Sarton

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

May Sarton

One must always get away to taste experience. One must always escape from people one loves in order to love them. Isn't it queer?

May Sarton

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

May Sarton

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

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

May Sarton

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

May Sarton

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and, once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.

May Sarton

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

May Sarton

There are some griefs so loud
They could bring down the sky,
And there are griefs so still
None knows how deep they lie.

May Sarton

Love, we still think, many of us, is for the young. But what do they really know about it? It is hard for them to differentiate between sexual passion and love itself, for instance.

May Sarton

In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

May Sarton

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

May Sarton