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
I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
Image
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
May Sarton
Image
each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
Image
In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
May Sarton
Image
all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
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
When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
May Sarton
Image
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
Image
I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
May Sarton
Image
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton
Image
letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.
May Sarton
Image
About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
May Sarton