110+ May Sarton Quotes On Marriage, Aging And Introspective

May Sarton was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. She wrote over fifty books, including poetry collections, novels, and memoirs. Her work is known for its exploration of aging, spirituality, and female identity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by May Sarton on life, love, marriage.

Top 10 May Sarton Quotes

1. We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked to be honest.
2. Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
3. We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
4. Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
5. What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
6. The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
7. There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.
8. A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
9. Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
10. For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

May Sarton Short Quotes

• Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.
• Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
• One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
• What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?
• Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed
• Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation
• We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
• I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.
• There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
• Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.

May Sarton Quotes About Life

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind. — May Sarton

One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about — May Sarton

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters. — May Sarton

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. — May Sarton

over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about? — May Sarton

life is always bringing unexpected gifts. — May Sarton

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death. — May Sarton

I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life. — May Sarton

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? — May Sarton

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

May Sarton Quotes About Love

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. — May Sarton

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self. — May Sarton

An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair. — May Sarton

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

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

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting! — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

May Sarton Quotes About Aging

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. — May Sarton

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . . — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. — May Sarton

Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration. — May Sarton

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are. — May Sarton

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward — May Sarton

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light. — May Sarton

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

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

May Sarton Famous Quotes And Sayings

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates. — May Sarton

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting. — May Sarton

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? — May Sarton

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? — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated. — May Sarton

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

... if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling. — May Sarton

It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness? — May Sarton

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work. — May Sarton

Most people have to talk so they won't hear. — May Sarton

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. — May Sarton

I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not. — May Sarton

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old! — May Sarton

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost. — May Sarton

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience. — May Sarton

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

We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent. — May Sarton

I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place. — May Sarton

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. — May Sarton

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. — May Sarton

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

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. — May Sarton

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists. — May Sarton

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic. — May Sarton

And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die. — May Sarton

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons. — May Sarton

instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion. — May Sarton

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be. — May Sarton

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness. — May Sarton

And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them. — May Sarton

True power is given to the vulnerable. — May Sarton

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it. — May Sarton

One of the springs of poetry is joy. — May Sarton

It feels a long way up and down from zero. — May Sarton

... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work. — May Sarton

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside. — May Sarton

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

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. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers. — May Sarton

You will always be here with me; As long as I live, A towering figure of love. — May Sarton

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech. — May Sarton

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. — May Sarton

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered. — May Sarton

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

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another. — May Sarton

Life Lessons by May Sarton

1. May Sarton encourages us to embrace our own unique paths in life and to trust our own intuition. She reminds us that life is a journey and that we should be open to learning from our experiences.
2. Sarton also emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and finding joy in the small moments of life. She reminds us to take time to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.
3. Finally, she encourages us to be kind to ourselves and to others, and to strive to create meaningful connections with those around us.