Quote

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

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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Whatever
Sing
Starry
Song
Grief
Phoenix
Night
Sea
Seas
Doe
Neither
Thrilling
Young
Cold
Waves
Take
Stars
Flight
Belief
Wave
Dies
Sky

More quotes by May Sarton

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I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
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It takes a long time for words to become thought.
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
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If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.
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O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.
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People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
May Sarton
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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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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
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They are commiting murder who merely live.
May Sarton
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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
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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
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It feels a long way up and down from zero.
May Sarton
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... love is healing, even rootless love.
May Sarton
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I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
May Sarton
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There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.
May Sarton
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In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton
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Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
May Sarton
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I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
May Sarton
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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton