May Sarton Quotes

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

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison. ~ 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 live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems. ~ May Sarton

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

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

I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not. ~ May Sarton

It is not so much trying to keep alive
As trying to keep from blowing apart
From inner explosions every day. ~ May Sarton

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself. ~ 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

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

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

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. ~ May Sarton

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

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. ~ May Sarton

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

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. ~ 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

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside. ~ May Sarton

Without anxiety life would have very little savor. ~ May Sarton

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. ~ May Sarton

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

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. ~ May Sarton

We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth. ~ May Sarton

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

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 ~ 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

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds? ~ May Sarton

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. ~ 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

KAIROS A unique time in a person's life; an opportunity for change. ~ May Sarton

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

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

Your poems will happen when no one is there. ~ May Sarton

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. ~ 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

Our two solitudes never quite merged, perhaps, but accepted each other gratefully. ~ May Sarton

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal. ~ 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

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

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

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

When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. ~ May Sarton

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. ~ May Sarton

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. ~ 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

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them. ~ 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

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy. ~ May Sarton

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

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

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest. ~ May Sarton

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind. ~ 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 of the privileges of old age was that no holds were barred. You were permitted to be absolutely honest. ~ May Sarton

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

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

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 ... ~ 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

Hilary has often asked herself why she felt the need for flowers..., but there it was. The house felt empty and desolate without them. They were silent guests who must be made happy, and who gave the atmosphere a kind of sou. ~ May Sarton

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

Time unbounded is hard to handle. ~ May Sarton

"How does one grow up?" I asked a friend. She answered, "By thinking!" ~ 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

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become ... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress. ~ May Sarton

So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. ~ May Sarton

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

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 ~ May Sarton

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling. ~ May Sarton

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

Art must be nourished by faith, the faith of an equal. ~ May Sarton

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

But as time goes on we not only remember specific things in relation to the people we have loved; their lives get built into our lives and finally the transference is complete. We are what we are because of them. ~ 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

Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate. ~ May Sarton

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

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. ~ May Sarton

It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to rest, even for a few hours. ~ 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

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

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. ~ May Sarton

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

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away. ~ 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

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 ... ~ May Sarton

And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
More gently and more subtly on the burning sands. ~ May Sarton

Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as "irrelevant"? When ~ May Sarton

Love is healing, even rootless love. ~ May Sarton

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

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff. ~ May Sarton

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. ~ May Sarton

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self. ~ May Sarton

Still, a person who cannot express love is stopping the flow of life, is censoring where censorship is a form of self-indulgence, the fear of giving oneself away. ~ May Sarton

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

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine
why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'? ~ May Sarton

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. ~ May Sarton