Quote

I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

May Sarton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Tell
Ghost
Past
Raises
Exposes
Soul
Solitude
Breathes
Done
Breathe
Exaltation
Work
Inner
Nerve
Never
Flow
Ghosts
Rest
Flows
Space
Nerves

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
May Sarton
Image
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!
May Sarton
Image
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.
May Sarton
Image
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
May Sarton
Image
In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
May Sarton
Image
I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
Image
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
Image
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?
May Sarton
Image
a poet never feels useful.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
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.
May Sarton
Image
Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
May Sarton
Image
Your poems will happen when no one is there.
May Sarton
Image
One does not find oneself by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.
May Sarton
Image
Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
May Sarton
Image
The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
May Sarton
Image
In the garden the door is always open into the holy - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
May Sarton
Image
instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.
May Sarton