May Sarton Quotes - Page 8

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

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

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

Fighting dragons is my holy joy.

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

Gardening is the instrument of grace.

Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it are always people who have had a hard time. Then the joy has no smugness or self-righteousness in it, is inclusive not exclusive, and comes close to prayer.

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

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?

Time spent with poets is never wasted.

Excellence costs a great deal.

What can I have that I still want?

...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?