May Sarton Quotes

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.

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

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

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

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

True power is given to the vulnerable.

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

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

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

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

Love is our human miracle.

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

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

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

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

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.

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

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

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.

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.

She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.

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

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

“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

... love is healing, even rootless love.

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

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

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

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

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

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

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.

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

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

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.

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

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

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... 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.

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward

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.

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.