May Sarton - Life Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

View all May Sarton Quotes
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
I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

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

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

May Sarton
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
I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have — but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.'

May Sarton
Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

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

May Sarton
It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.

May Sarton