Top 200 May Sarton Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech...”

— May Sarton

202. “To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive.”

— May Sarton

203. “I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.”

— May Sarton

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.”

— May Sarton

208. “I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely ’played.”

— May Sarton

209. “The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.”

— May Sarton

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

— May Sarton

211. “I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space – all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out.”

— May Sarton

212. “Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.”

— May Sarton

213. “In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.”

— May Sarton

214. “Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination?”

— May Sarton

215. “Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing... enduring... waiting.”

— May Sarton

216. “At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.”

— May Sarton

217. “I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.”

— May Sarton

218. “In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.”

— May Sarton

219. “Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning’s work.”

— May Sarton

220. “How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

— May Sarton

221. “Our two solitudes never quite merged, perhaps, but accepted each other gratefully.”

— May Sarton

222. “The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won’t boil over!”

— May Sarton

223. “True power is given to the vulnerable.”

— May Sarton

224. “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

225. “Here in the United States we appear to be becoming more and more a country devoted to amenities for the rich, more and more neglectful of the poor.”

— May Sarton

226. “Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?”

— May Sarton

227. “My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a “symptom”? There.”

— May Sarton

228. “How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!”

— May Sarton

229. “I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within. People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.”

— May Sarton

230. “Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.”

— May Sarton

231. “Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing...”

— May Sarton

232. “It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.”

— May Sarton

233. “I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.”

— May Sarton

234. “I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.”

— May Sarton

235. “One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.”

— May Sarton

236. “What can I have that I still want?”

— May Sarton

237. “Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn’t there.”

— May Sarton

238. “Do we always make our freedom out of someone else’s bondage?”

— May Sarton

239. “One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.”

— May Sarton

240. “Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.”

— May Sarton

241. “A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.”

— May Sarton

242. “There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”

— May Sarton

243. “There is really only one possible prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence.”

— May Sarton

244. “The roots of love need watering or it dies.”

— May Sarton

245. “I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.”

— May Sarton

246. “The delights of the poet as I jotted them down turned out to be light, solitude, the natural world, love, time, creation itself. Suddenly after the months of depression I am fully alive in all these areas, and awake.”

— May Sarton

247. “We go up to Heaven and down to Hell a dozen times a day.”

— May Sarton

248. “There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gifts to those one loves most.”

— May Sarton

249. “I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the silt – unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.”

— May Sarton