May Sarton Quotes & Sayings

The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the "creative" is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death. — 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

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

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic. — May Sarton

What can I have that I still want? — May Sarton

If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York. — May Sarton

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out. — May Sarton

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast. — May Sarton

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot. — May Sarton

Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer. — May Sarton

Adventures may be for the adventurous, but home is where the real things are sown and reaped, where in the end the real things happen. They — 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

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. — 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

Laura felt now completely detached from her body. It was, she considered, simply a piece of machinery that was running down. But how could the separation be made? How could she find herself without this machine that labored for breath and rejected food and sent her into misery with the coughing? It could not be tamed. It could not be cajoled. It had, she felt, to be quite simply rejected as irrelevant. — May Sarton

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live ... — May Sarton

The reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence. — May Sarton

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting! — May Sarton

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists. — May Sarton

I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it. — May Sarton

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves. — May Sarton

In the country of pain we are each alone. — May Sarton

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen 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

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre. — May Sarton

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible. — May Sarton

I loved them all the way one loves at any age
if it's real at all
obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world
and in a way I suppose they were. — May Sarton

It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength. — May Sarton

We have to break the mirror to be ourselves... — May Sarton

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so. — May Sarton

In Texas there's so much space words have a way
Of getting lost in the silence before they're spoken
So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;
And when they say it the silence is not broken,
But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them
Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills,
And they are part of that silence that outlives them. — May Sarton

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude. — May Sarton

We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains. — May Sarton

When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work. — May Sarton

The only way through pain ... is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth. — May Sarton

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass. — May Sarton

It feels a long way up and down from zero. — May Sarton

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it. — May Sarton

Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination? — May Sarton

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old! — May Sarton

Laura opened her eyes, feeling like a stranger in her own garden. But if she was a stranger here, where was home? And who was she herself now? The real panic was a loss of identity, for she seemed inextricably woven into her body's weakness and discomfort, into her struggling sick lungs. What essence was there to be separated from her hand, her flesh, her bones. Laura lifted her hand, so thin it had become transparent. Is this I? This leaflike thing, falling away, falling away, this universe of molecules disintegrating, this miracle about to be transformed into nothingness. — May Sarton

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent. — May Sarton

It takes a long time for words to become thought ... — May Sarton

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person ... — May Sarton

Fire is a good companion for the mind ... — May Sarton

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death. — May Sarton

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can. — May Sarton

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

It is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence - nature, the arts, human love. — May Sarton

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life. — May Sarton

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

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

Love is our human miracle. — May Sarton

Have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself. — May Sarton

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was. — May Sarton

A poet never feels useful. — May Sarton

I too have known the inward disturbance of exile,
The great peril of being at home nowhere,
The dispersed center, the dividing love;
Not here, nor there, leaping across ocean,
Turning, returning to each strong allegiance;
American, but with this difference - parting. — May Sarton

It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness? — May Sarton

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates. — May Sarton

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing
the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on. — May Sarton

One of the springs of poetry is joy ... — May Sarton

My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a "symptom"? There — May Sarton

I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love. — May Sarton

We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else. — May Sarton

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever. — May Sarton

There is no need of words. Our lives will do,
Long long enough to learn all of our love,
While time, the river, flows gently below,
Having no false eternities to prove.
The night is full of unspent tenderness
And in its silences we rest apart.
There is no need of words with which to bless
The daily bread, the wine of the full heart.
Here are the peaceful days we cannot share.
Here is our peace at last, and we not there. — May Sarton

Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary. — May Sarton

The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable — May Sarton

Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter? — 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

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff. — 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

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

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. — May Sarton

Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry? — May Sarton

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?
I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman. — May Sarton

Winter Grace It is autumn again and our anxiety blows With the wind, breaking the heart of the rose, Petals and leaves fall down and everything goes. All but the seed, all but the hard bright berry And the bulbs we kneel on the earth to bury And lay away with our anguish and our worry. It is time we learned again the winter grace To put the nerves to sleep in a dark place And smooth the lines in the self-tortured face. For we are at the end of our endurance nearly And we shall have to die this winter surely, For this is the end of more than a season clearly. Now we shall have to be poor, to yield up all, With the leaves wither, with the petals fall, Now we shall have to die, once and for all. Before the seed of faith so deep and still Pushes up gently through the frozen will And the joyless wake and learn to be joyful. Before this buried love leaps up from sorrow And doubt and violence and pity follow To greet the radiant morning and the swallow. — May Sarton

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up. — May Sarton

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being. — May Sarton

Women's work is always toward wholeness. — May Sarton

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time. — May Sarton

Song

This is the love I bring,
Absolute and nothing:
A tree but with no roots,
A cloud heavy with fruit,
A wide stone stair
That leads nowhere
But to empty sky,
Ambiguous majesty.

This is the love I bear:
It is light as air,
Yet weighs like an earth;
It is water flowing,
Yet adamant as fire.
It is coming from going.
It is dying and growing.

A love so rare and hard
It cuts a diamond word
Upon the windowpane,
"Never, never again,
Never upon my breast,"
Having no time to bring,
Having no place to rest,
Absolute and nothing. — May Sarton

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

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another. — May Sarton

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is? — May Sarton

Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature. — May Sarton

But when Ellen throws at me that I have never had to struggle I feel like saying, 'Maybe. But I have had to learn to be capable in a hundred ways that were no pleasure or nourishment really. If I had not been rich, I might have become a good painter.' Instead, right now I had better get the silver out and see what needs polishing. — May Sarton

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless. — May Sarton

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time
except maybe when I'm making love. — May Sarton

About loving, I have little to learn from the young. — May Sarton

Failure cannot be erased. It is built in to a life and helps us grow. Failure cannot be erased, but it can be understood.
Most people carry around a load of feeling that they bury or pretend is not there because it is too painful and alarming to cope with or because it involved unbearable guilt. Anger against a parent, for example.
I knew the tide of woe was rising, that woe that seizes me like anger, and is a form of anger, and I didn't know what to do to stop it, so I got up and picked flowers, cooked my dinner, looked at the news, all the same usual routine that can ward off the devils or suddenly clear the air as when a thunderstorm seems to be coming and then dissipates ... .it always happens when there is a galaxy of problems that get knit together into one huge outcry against the sense of being abandoned or orphanhood ... — May Sarton

I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words. — May Sarton

The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive. — 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

Instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion. — May Sarton

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played. — May Sarton

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy. — May Sarton

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there. — May Sarton

The means of choice:
She might choose to ascend
The falling dream,
By some angelic power without a name
Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,
Know height without an end,
Density melt to air, silence yield a voice
Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace. — May Sarton

When I am working I immediately feel hopeful. — May Sarton

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work. — May Sarton