Best 260 quotes of May Sarton on MyQuotes

A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

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

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.

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

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?

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

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

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

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

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

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.

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

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

Fire is a good companion for the mind.

Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.  But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see.  I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

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

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

For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

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?

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.

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.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.

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

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

Gardening is an instrument of grace.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!