May Sarton famous quotes

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

#Love #Inspirational #Flower

The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
-- May Sarton

#Opposites #Mind #Certain

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.
-- May Sarton

#Life #Patience #Nature

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.
-- May Sarton

#Light #Important #Lines

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

#Inspirational #Dream #Real

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.
-- May Sarton

#Artist #Self #Joy

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.
-- May Sarton

#Being Yourself #Discipline #Routine

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
-- May Sarton

#Light #Trying #Rooms

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
-- May Sarton

#Loneliness #Being Alone #Self

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!
-- May Sarton

#Baby #Thinking #Months

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
-- May Sarton

#People

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 (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?
-- May Sarton

#Art #Children #Book

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
-- May Sarton

#Letting Go #Nature #Pain

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

#Death #Failure #Loss

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.
-- May Sarton

#Crush #Light #Perception

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
-- May Sarton

#Feelings #Cost #May

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
-- May Sarton

#Opposites #Giving #Want

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

#Home #House #Doe

I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.
-- May Sarton

#Autumn #Long #October

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
-- May Sarton

#Letting Go #Pain #Fall

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

#Baby #Genius #Forget

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
-- May Sarton

#Flower #Garden #Greedy

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

#Talking #People #Joy

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.
-- May Sarton

#Lying #Grief #Sky

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.
-- May Sarton

#Silence #Lines #Between The Lines

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
-- May Sarton

#Too Much #Haste #Expecting

Gardening is an instrument of grace.
-- May Sarton

#Grace #Gardening #Instruments

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
-- May Sarton

#Beauty #Order #Meditation

We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
-- May Sarton

#Fighting #Understanding #Growth

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.
-- May Sarton

#Spring #Believe #Loss

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

#Humor #Laughing #Able

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

#Music #Flower #Silence

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.
-- May Sarton

#Peace #Feelings #World

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
-- May Sarton

#Country #Writing #Wonder

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.
-- May Sarton

#Pet #Deny #Vulnerability

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
-- May Sarton

#Taken #Years

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

#Writing #Fifteen #Enough

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.
-- May Sarton

#Reading #Flower #Feelings

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.
-- May Sarton

#Real #Believe #Holding Back

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.
-- May Sarton

#Real #Believe #Struggle

Your poems will happen when no one is there.
-- May Sarton

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
-- May Sarton

#Danger #Dangerous

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

#Love #Relationship #Giving Up

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.
-- May Sarton

#Essence #People #Challenges

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.
-- May Sarton

#Space #Trying #May

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
-- May Sarton

#Inspirational #Truth #Enough

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

#Courage #Hero #Thinking

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.
-- May Sarton

#Self #Class #Two

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.
-- May Sarton

#Frustration #Age #Growing

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.
-- May Sarton

#Body #Sacred #Forget

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!
-- May Sarton

#Children #Years #Play

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

#Age #Assuming #Easy

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?
-- May Sarton

#Laughter #Past #Doe

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.
-- May Sarton

#Men #Thinking #Touching

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.
-- May Sarton

#People #Looks #Ruthlessness

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

#Journey #Novel #Journal

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.
-- May Sarton

#Dark #Age #Violence

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

#Self Confidence #Age #Weakness

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.
-- May Sarton

#Honesty #Honest #Being Honest

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.
-- May Sarton

#Believe #Creating #Soul

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

#Ocean #Dark #Blue

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

#Understanding #Facts #Essentials

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

#Real #Inspiration #Age

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.
-- May Sarton

#Fighting #Dragons #Joy

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
-- May Sarton

#Joy #Absurd #Pencils

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

#Joy #World #Hold Fast

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.
-- May Sarton

#Pain #Self #People

It feels a long way up and down from zero.
-- May Sarton

#Zero #Long #Way

...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.
-- May Sarton

#Sex #Writing #Two

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression...
-- May Sarton

#Stress #Solitude #Balance

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.
-- May Sarton

#Real #People #Effort

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.
-- May Sarton

#Pain #Wings #Phoenix

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
-- May Sarton

#Anxiety #Littles

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

#Revision #Creation #Process

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.
-- May Sarton

#Happiness #Thinking #Lasts

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

#Inspiring #Children #Play

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

#Flower #Giving #Romance

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!
-- May Sarton

#Passion #Love Is #Views

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

#Important

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!
-- May Sarton

#Anger #People #Safety

Fire is a good companion for the mind ...
-- May Sarton

#Fire #Mind #Companion

The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
-- May Sarton

#People #Experience #Helping

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

#School #Way #Path

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 ...
-- May Sarton

#Failure #Artist #Growing

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

#Morning #Heart #Lunch

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.
-- May Sarton

#Dream #Space #Water

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.
-- May Sarton

#Song #Stars #Grief

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

#Life And Death #Learning To Trust #Ready

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

#Earth #Gentle

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.
-- May Sarton

#Art #Psychics #Mad

We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else.
-- May Sarton

#Patience #Art #Patient

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?
-- May Sarton

#Bondage

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?
-- May Sarton

#Loss #Self #Secret

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
-- May Sarton

#Strength #Happiness #People

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

#Winter #Solitude #Alive

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
-- May Sarton

#Art #Art Is

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

#Gardening #Going Away #Age

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.
-- May Sarton

#Believe #Belief #Talent

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.
-- May Sarton

#Feelings #Want #Strange

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!
-- May Sarton

#Share #Nature Love #Bases