Top 277 Quotes & Sayings by May Sarton - Page 5

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

They are commiting murder who merely live.

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.

We only keep what we lose.

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

life is always bringing unexpected gifts.

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... 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!

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

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.

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.

Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

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.

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.

gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.

Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.

O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.

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.

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

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

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.

when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.

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!