May Sarton Quotes

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.

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.

You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

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

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

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

A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating - the brink of a voice and never a voice.

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.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

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

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

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.

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

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.

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

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

We only keep what we lose.

What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.

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.

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

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

have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

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

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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.

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

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

We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.

a poet never feels useful.

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

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