May Sarton Quotes

In the country of pain we are each alone.

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

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

I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.

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.

One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.

What can I have that I still want?

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

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?

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation

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

When it comes to the important things one is always alone.

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

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

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.

It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

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.

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.

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

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

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.

over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

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

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

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .

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

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.

Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

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.

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.

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.