May Sarton Quotes

199 Sourced Quotes

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.

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

May Sarton
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
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
There is a wilder solitude in winter
When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

May Sarton
I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

May Sarton
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting.

May Sarton
Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

May Sarton
Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.

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

May Sarton
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

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

May Sarton
It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

May Sarton
I tell you the gods are still alive
And they are not consoling.

May Sarton
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

May Sarton
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.

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

May Sarton
In Texas the lid blew off the sky a long time ago
So there's nothing to keep the wind from blowing
And it blows all the time.

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

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

May Sarton
Beaming like a lesser god,
He bounced upon the earth he trod.

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
It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss between people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.

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

May Sarton
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

May Sarton
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

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

May Sarton
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.

May Sarton
I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him — one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).

May Sarton