Best 260 quotes of May Sarton on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.

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

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.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?

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.

I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.

I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It's not weird if you feel deeply.

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.

I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

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

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

... love is healing, even rootless love.

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

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

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

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.

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

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

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

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.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

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

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?