Quote

The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.

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
Chance
Absorb
Pain
Miss
Understand
Door
Means
Exactly
Mean
Missing
Way
Close
Doors
Growth
Probe

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
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
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
I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
May Sarton
Image
There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
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
It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.
May Sarton
Image
In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
May Sarton
Image
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
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
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
May Sarton
Image
Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
It feels a long way up and down from zero.
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