May Sarton Quotes - Page 4

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

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

It takes a long time for words to become thought.

Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

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

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

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

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

True power is given to the vulnerable.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.

It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.

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