Top 200 May Sarton Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.”

— May Sarton

157. “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

158. “When one’s not writing poems – and I’m not at the moment – you wonder how you ever did it. It’s like another country you can’t reach.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

160. “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

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

— May Sarton

162. “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

163. “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

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

167. “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

168. “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

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

— May Sarton

170. “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

171. “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

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

176. “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

177. “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

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

181. “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

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

— May Sarton

183. “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

184. “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

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “We only keep what we lose.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

192. “Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

195. “A garden is a perpetual experiment. It may evoke, but it can rarely memorialize, at least in the sense of imitation. Gardens are as original as people.”

— May Sarton

196. “Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”

— May Sarton

197. “For a Fur Person is a cat whom human beings love in the right way, allowing him to keep his dignity, his reserve and his freedom. And a Fur Person is a cat who has come to love one or, in very exceptional cases, two human beings and who has decided to stay with them as long as he lives. This can only happen if the human being has imagined part of himself into a cat just as the cat has imagined part of himself into a human being. It is a mutual exchange.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton