Quote

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

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
Would
Stopped
Somewhere
Failure
Duty
Growing
Artist
Keep
Whole

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause then she answered, “By thinking.”
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
There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
May Sarton
Image
each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May Sarton
Image
For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
May Sarton
Image
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
May Sarton
Image
Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
Image
There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
Image
Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
May Sarton
Image
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.
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
I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
May Sarton
Image
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
Image
letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.
May Sarton
Image
An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
Image
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton
Image
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
Image
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
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
In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton