May Sarton Quotes - Page 2

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.

How slowly one comes to understand anything!

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

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.

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

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.

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

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.

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.

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

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

In the country of pain we are each alone.

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

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.

The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.

Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

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

It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.

I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

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

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.

Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine - why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity?