May Sarton Quotes

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

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!

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

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

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.

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.

She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.

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

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

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.

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

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

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

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

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.

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.

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

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.

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

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

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

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?

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

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

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

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

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.

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

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

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.

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

In the country of pain we are each alone.

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.

Women's work is always toward wholeness.

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

True power is given to the vulnerable.

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

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

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

... love is healing, even rootless love.