May Sarton Quotes

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.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

Plants do not speak, but their silence is alive with change.

A Fur Person must be adopted by catly humans, tactful, delicate, respectful, indulgent; these are fairly rare, though not as rare as might be supposed.

In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.

Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

Women's work is always toward wholeness.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

I loved them in the way one loves at any age - if it's real at all - obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, 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." She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive ... if he thought she didn't know what she was talking about! "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

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

We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.

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

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

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.

A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost - Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends.

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

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

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.

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.

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

We are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

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.

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.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

We can accept death. It is the dying that is not and never will be acceptable. For us who have to witness dying, it must always feel as if the very fabric of life were being torn apart.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time ...

The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation ... It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

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.

Now I become myself. It's taken time, many years and places.

I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.

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

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.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.

The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.

Time unbounded is hard to handle.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

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

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.

Old age is really a disguise that no one but the old themselves see through. I feel exactly as I always did, as young inside as when I was twenty-one, but the outward shell conceals the real me - sometimes even from itself - and betrays that person deep down inside, under wrinkles and liver spots and all the horrors of decay. I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on. But

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

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.

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.

It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.

Love is healing, even rootless love.

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

Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person

Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

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

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

What "they" never understood about her solitary life was that it was a solitude so inhabited by the past, that she was never alone in it, except sometimes in the rich disorder of her work room upstairs.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

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

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

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

To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive.

Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations".

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.

It is time I came back to my real life
After this voyage to an island with no name,
Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper ...

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.

The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.

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.

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die ... they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing ...

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

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.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

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

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression ...

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.

one of the privileges of old age was that no holds were barred. You were permitted to be absolutely honest.

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.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have ... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!

Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing...enduring...waiting.

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.

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.

When I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

The sheer vital energy of the Woolfs always astonishes me when I stop to consider what they accomplished on any given day. Fragile she may have been, living on the edge of psychic disturbance, but think what she managed to do nonetheless -- not only the novels (every one a breakthrough in form), but all those essays and reviews, all the work of the Hogarth Press, not only reading mss. and editing, but, at least at the start, packing the books to go out!

And besides all that, they lived such an intense social life. (When I went there for tea, they were always going out for dinner and often to a party later on.) The gaiety and the fun of it all, the huge sense of life! The long, long walks through London that Elizabeth Bowen told me about. And two houses to keep going! Who of us could accomplish what she did?

There may be a lot of self-involvement in A Writer's Diary, but there is no self-pity (and what has to be remembered is that what Leonard published at that time was only a small part of all the journals, the part that concerned her work, so it had to be self-involved). It is painful that such genius should evoke such mean-spirited response at present. Is genius so common that we can afford to brush it aside? What does it matter if she is major or minor, whether she imitated Joyce (I believe she did not), whether her genius was a limited one, limited by class? What remains true is that one cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page withou

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

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

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.