May Sarton Quotes

199 Sourced Quotes

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

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

May Sarton
I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.

May Sarton
Flowers and plants are silence presences; they nourish every sense except the ear.

May Sarton
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

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
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

May Sarton
Solitude swells the inner space
Like a balloon.
We are wafted hither and thither
On the air currents.
How to land it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May Sarton