May Sarton Quotes - Page 11

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

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!

Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!

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

Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

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

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

For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.

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.

in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

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

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.

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.

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

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

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

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.

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.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?