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I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.

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
Better
Recognition
Life
Terror
Handle
Realized
Exactly
Asked
Question
Start
Commensurate

More quotes by May Sarton

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Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
May Sarton
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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
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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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Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
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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For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
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The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.
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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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 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
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Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
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I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.
May Sarton
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It feels a long way up and down from zero.
May Sarton
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
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A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
May Sarton
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We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.
May Sarton
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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
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I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton
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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