May Sarton Quotes

True power is given to the vulnerable.

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

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

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.

Excellence costs a great deal.

Love is our human miracle.

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

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

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

It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.

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

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

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

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

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

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.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

What can I have that I still want?

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

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

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

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

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

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

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

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

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

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.

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

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

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.

a poet never feels useful.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

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

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.

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

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

It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.

There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

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

Time unbounded is hard to handle.

Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.