Top 200 May Sarton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

53. “Your poems will happen when no one is there.”

— May Sarton

54. “For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.”

— May Sarton

55. “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.”

— May Sarton

56. “For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only ’living and partly living.”

— May Sarton

57. “Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.”

— May Sarton

58. “Love is our human miracle.”

— May Sarton

59. “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.”

— May Sarton

60. “How slowly one comes to understand anything!”

— May Sarton

61. “Time spent with poets is never wasted.”

— May Sarton

62. “It takes a long time for words to become thought...”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

64. “It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through – the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or another.”

— May Sarton

65. “Adventures may be for the adventurous, but home is where the real things are sown and reaped, where in the end the real things happen. They.”

— May Sarton

66. “But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

68. “I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.”

— May Sarton

69. “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.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

71. “Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

73. “We can accept death. It is the dying that is not and never will be acceptable. For us who have to witness dying, it must always feel as if the very fabric of life were being torn apart.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

75. “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.”

— May Sarton

76. “In the country of pain we are each alone.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

78. “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.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

80. “Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time. The apparently measured time has immeasureable space within it, and in this it resembles music. The routine I established.”

— May Sarton

81. “We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.”

— May Sarton

82. “I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.”

— May Sarton

83. “It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to rest, even for a few hours.”

— May Sarton

84. “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.”

— May Sarton

85. “I’ve been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It’s not that, it’s a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.”

— May Sarton

86. “Gardening is an instrument of grace.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

88. “For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

90. “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!”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

92. “True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.”

— May Sarton

93. “Family life! The United Nations is child’s play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.”

— May Sarton

94. “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.”

— May Sarton

95. “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.”

— May Sarton

96. “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.”

— May Sarton

97. “The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.”

— May Sarton

98. “A Fur Person must be adopted by catly humans, tactful, delicate, respectful, indulgent; these are fairly rare, though not as rare as might be supposed.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

100. “Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself.”

— May Sarton