Quote

Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?

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
Doe
Legends
Persons
Remembered
Person
Laughter
Come
Becomes
Even
Help
Make
Enjoy
Hardships
Helping
Legend
Past
Hardship

More quotes by 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
My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
Image
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
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
It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
May Sarton
Image
Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.
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
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
Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
May Sarton
Image
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
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
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton
Image
It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.
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
Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
Image
Time unbounded is hard to handle.
May Sarton
Image
Your poems will happen when no one is there.
May Sarton