May Sarton Quotes

199 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
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