May sarton quotes

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

How slowly one comes to understand anything!

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.

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.

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

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.

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

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

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.

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

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

Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

... love is healing, even rootless love.

I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

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.

In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

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.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

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

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

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

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.

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.

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

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

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

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.

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

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

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.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

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

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

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

The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

... if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

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

Love is our human miracle.

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

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.

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

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

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.

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.

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

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

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

Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

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!

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.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

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

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

Fire is a good companion for the mind.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

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.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

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

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

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

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

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.

When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

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.

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.

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

The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.

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.

have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.

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.

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.

we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.

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

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

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

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

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.

... 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.

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

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

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

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

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

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.

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.

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?

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.