Quote

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

May Sarton

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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Giving
Heavy
Even
Turned
Kind
Flow
Life
Gift
Backed
Becomes
Unable
Though
Inward
Given
Poison
Sometimes
Burden

More quotes by May Sarton

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It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems our poems choose us.
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
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It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
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When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
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He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.
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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
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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.
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Love is our human miracle.
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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
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Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
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People who cannot feel punish those who do.
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Time unbounded is hard to handle.
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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
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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.
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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.
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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
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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.
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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.
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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