May Sarton Quotes

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.

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.

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

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.

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

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

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

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

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

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

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.

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

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

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.

You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

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

It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.

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.

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

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

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

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

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.

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

They are commiting murder who merely live.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

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.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

We only keep what we lose.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

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

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.

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

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

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.

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

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. . . .

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

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

The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

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

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

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.