Quote

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

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
World
Focuses
Muse
Poetry
Woman
Write
Part
Able
Writing

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
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
Image
When I am alone the flowers are really seen I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
May Sarton
Image
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
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
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
Image
Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
Image
Love is our human miracle.
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
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
Image
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
Image
A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.
May Sarton
Image
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
May Sarton