Quote

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

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
Written
Born
Book
Never
Answer
Needed
Question
Answers

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
Image
May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant that is what matters.
May Sarton
Image
There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
Image
In the garden the door is always open into the holy - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
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
More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.
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
You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
May Sarton
Image
Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
May Sarton
Image
True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton
Image
About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
May Sarton
Image
And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.
May Sarton
Image
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about
May Sarton
Image
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
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
The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
May Sarton
Image
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
May Sarton
Image
Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
Image
In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
Image
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
May Sarton