May Sarton Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

  May Sarton

  Moral, Dilemma, Making Peace

  "Recovering: A Journal".

  19 Copy quote

• Gardening is the instrument of grace.

  May Sarton

  Grace, Gardening, Instruments

  5 Copy quote

• Time spent with poets is never wasted.

  May Sarton

  Poet, Time Spent

  4 Copy quote

• I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

  May Sarton

  Writing, Universal, Written

  Quoted in Encore: A Journal of the 80thYear (1993).

  4 Copy quote

• Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

  May Sarton

  Mountain, Define You

  May Sarton (2014). “Collected Poems: 1930–1993”, p.59, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

  May Sarton

  Teaching, Needs, Way

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.21, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

  May Sarton

  Doe, Persons

  4 Copy quote

• each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

  May Sarton

  Energy, Literature, Formal

  May Sarton (2015). “Writings on Writing”, p.6, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

  May Sarton

  Self, Long, Machines

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

  May Sarton

  Travel, Reality, Cities

  May Sarton (2014). “I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography”, p.114, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

  May Sarton

  Children, Believe, Long

  May Sarton (2014). “I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography”, p.60, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?

  May Sarton

  People, Naked, Would Be

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.91, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

• I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).

  May Sarton

  Men, Differences, Understanding

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• Women's work is always toward wholeness.

  May Sarton

  Dishes, Wholeness

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

Page 9 of 11

First

← Prev

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin