Quote

Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.

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
Nobody
Special
Learn
Anna
Stays

More quotes by 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
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
Image
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
May Sarton
Image
I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
May Sarton
Image
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
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
Your poems will happen when no one is there.
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
There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
May Sarton
Image
... 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
Image
I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
May Sarton
Image
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
Image
I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
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
So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.
May Sarton
Image
I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton