Quote

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

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
Paid
Blood
Lasts
Last
Energy
Nothing
Vast
Time
Debt
World
Fame

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems our poems choose us.
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
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
“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
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
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
Image
It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
May Sarton
Image
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton
Image
When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
May Sarton
Image
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.
May Sarton
Image
we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
May Sarton
Image
I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).
May Sarton
Image
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
Image
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
May Sarton
Image
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
Image
You will always be here with me As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
May Sarton
Image
Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.
May Sarton
Image
all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
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