May Sarton Quotes - Page 9

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I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

May Sarton

Passion, Thinking, Two

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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?

May Sarton

Reality, Odds, Doe

May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.56, Open Road Media

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We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.

May Sarton

Strong, Spring, Fall

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

May Sarton

Forever, Done, Goes On

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I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

May Sarton

Real, Heart, Animal

May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.19, Open Road Media

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a poet never feels useful.

May Sarton

Poet, Feels

May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.84, Open Road Media

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Women's work is always toward wholeness.

May Sarton

Dishes, Wholeness

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We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.

May Sarton

Understanding, Littles, Before Death

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

May Sarton

Order, Curious, Feels

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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.

May Sarton

Mistake, Men, Order

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

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I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.

May Sarton

Beautiful, Diaries, Half

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In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

May Sarton

Death, Flower, Creativity

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

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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

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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.

May Sarton

Writing, Character, Feelings

May Sarton (2015). “Writings on Writing”, p.18, Open Road Media

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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.

May Sarton

Writing, Artist, Civilization

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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, Intimate Relationships, Self

May Sarton (2014). “Recovering: A Journal”, p.176, Open Road Media

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

May Sarton

Order, Disorder, Sacraments

May Sarton (2014). “Recovering: A Journal”, p.25, Open Road Media

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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.

May Sarton

Self, People, Solitude

May Sarton (2014). “At Seventy: A Journal”, p.135, Open Road Media

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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.

May Sarton

Flower, Passion, Snow

May Sarton (2014). “Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal”, p.77, Open Road Media

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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.

May Sarton

Garden, Roots, Gloves

May Sarton, Marilyn Kallet (1993). “A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton's Poetry”, p.135, Univ. of Tennessee Press

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

May Sarton

Real, Inspiration, Age

May Sarton (2014). “At Seventy: A Journal”, p.2, Open Road Media

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Time unbounded is hard to handle.

May Sarton

Hard To Handle, Handle, Hard

May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.116, Open Road Media

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

May Sarton

Winter, Solitude, Alive

May Sarton (2014). “As Does New Hampshire: And Other Poems”, p.10, Open Road Media

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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

May Sarton (2014). “Journal of a Solitude”, p.63, Open Road Media

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Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?

May Sarton

Doors, Half, Hours

May Sarton, Earl G. Ingersoll (1991). “Conversations with May Sarton”, p.122, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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Born: May 3, 1912
Died: July 16, 1995
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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