May Sarton Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

  May Sarton

  Acceptance, Balance, Asking

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.72, Open Road Media

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• 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?

  May Sarton

  Needs, Way, Language

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

  May Sarton

  Flower, Garden, Greedy

  May Sarton (2015). “Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year”, p.188, Open Road Media

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

  May Sarton

  Garden, Giving, Essentials

  May Sarton (2014). “Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal”, p.66, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  May Sarton

  Voice, Space, Silence

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• Gardening is an instrument of grace.

  May Sarton

  Grace, Gardening, Instruments

  May Sarton (2017). “The Journals of May Sarton Volume One: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and Recovering”, p.97, Open Road Media

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• letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.

  May Sarton

  Giving, Letters, Easier

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• 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.

  May Sarton

  Hard Work, Expectations, Smallest

  May Sarton (2014). “Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal”, p.74, Open Road Media

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• 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

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

  May Sarton

  Art, Art Is, Ifs

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.42, Open Road Media

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

  May Sarton

  Writing, Fifteen, Enough

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.39, Open Road Media

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• 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

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• 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

  May Sarton (2014). “The House by the Sea: A Journal”, p.91, Open Road Media

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

  May Sarton

  Art, Order, Chaos

  May Sarton, Edith Royce Schade (1994). “From May Sarton's well: writings of May Sarton”, Papier Mache Pr

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

  May Sarton

  Gardening, Going Away, Age

  May Sarton (2014). “At Seventy: A Journal”, p.30, Open Road Media

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• 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

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• [In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .

  May Sarton

  Age, Innocence, Moments

  May Sarton, Earl G. Ingersoll (1991). “Conversations with May Sarton”, p.124, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.59, Open Road Media

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

  May Sarton

  Blood, Energy, Debt

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.34, Open Road Media

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

  May Sarton

  Mother, Grief, Breathe

  May Sarton (2014). “Collected Poems: 1930–1993”, p.678, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  May Sarton

  Art, Passion, Destruction

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• 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

  May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.103, Open Road Media

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• The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

  May Sarton

  War, Moving, Power

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.96, Open Road Media

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• 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.

  May Sarton

  Lying, Healing, Eye

  May Sarton (2014). “In Time Like Air: Poems”, p.55, Open Road Media

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• When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.

  May Sarton

  Moving, Cat, Gentleman

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