Top 277 Quotes & Sayings by May Sarton

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.

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.

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.

Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

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

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

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

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

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

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

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!

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

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.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

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

No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.

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

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

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

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

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.

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

Love is our human miracle.

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.

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.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.

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

The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.

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.

I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep.... 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.

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.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

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

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.

Your poems will happen when no one is there.

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

instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

How slowly one comes to understand anything!

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.

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.

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

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

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

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

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.