Top 200 May Sarton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “What “they” never understood about her solitary life was that it was a solitude so inhabited by the past, that she was never alone in it, except sometimes in the rich disorder of her work room upstairs.”

— May Sarton

152. “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.”

— May Sarton

153. “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

154. “How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm!”

— May Sarton

155. “I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry – I am writing a lot.”

— May Sarton

156. “If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?”

— May Sarton

157. “I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, ‘won’t go,’ or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.”

— May Sarton

158. “I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.”

— May Sarton

159. “I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time – except maybe when I’m making love.”

— May Sarton

160. “About loving, I have little to learn from the young.”

— May Sarton

161. “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.”

— May Sarton

162. “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

163. “The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.”

— May Sarton

164. “Self-reliance? Yes, but that first spring I had to learn dependency too. By crying for help and seeing help come from several directions, I began to learn what the village is all about: on the one hand, respect for privacy, and on the other, awareness of each other’s needs. So, however solitary some of us may look to an outsider, we are in truth part of an invisible web and supported by its presence.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

166. “For after all we make our faces as we go along...”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

168. “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.”

— May Sarton

169. “Art must be nourished by faith, the faith of an equal.”

— May Sarton

170. “Women’s work is always toward wholeness.”

— May Sarton

171. “Don’t forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.”

— May Sarton

172. “Fire is a good companion for the mind...”

— May Sarton

173. “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

174. “The value of solitude – one of its values – is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression...”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

176. “People who cannot feel punish those who do.”

— May Sarton

177. “We have to break the mirror to be ourselves...”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

179. “Hilary has often asked herself why she felt the need for flowers... , but there it was. The house felt empty and desolate without them. They were silent guests who must be made happy, and who gave the atmosphere a kind of sou.”

— May Sarton

180. “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

181. “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, toward those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.”

— May Sarton

182. “We only keep what we lose.”

— May Sarton

183. “You can’t plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I’m inspired.”

— May Sarton

184. “So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.”

— May Sarton

185. “My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn’s children’s symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!”

— May Sarton

186. “Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.”

— May Sarton

187. “Nothing gets easier as one gets older. Everything is harder, even buttoning one’s slipper!”

— May Sarton

188. “I am starved for tenderness and that is what is the matter with me and has been the matter with me for months.”

— May Sarton

189. “The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. Every human instinct is to turn away. Not see. It is, I’m afraid, exemplified by Reagan who refuses to imagine the suffering of twelve million unemployed and the degradation of men and women who are deprived of work and treated in this country like pariahs.”

— May Sarton

190. “Do I think there’s life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

194. “Without anxiety life would have very little savor.”

— May Sarton

195. “Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech...”

— May Sarton

196. “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.”

— May Sarton

197. “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.”

— May Sarton

198. “May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best – out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

200. “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