Quote

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

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
Imagine
Grows
Comes
Young
Older
Persons
Played
Person
Merely
Live
Role
Sometimes
Roles

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.
May Sarton
Image
Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
May Sarton
Image
How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.
May Sarton
Image
In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton
Image
She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.
May Sarton
Image
The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
May Sarton
Image
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
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
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
Image
For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?
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
It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
May Sarton
Image
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
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
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.
May Sarton
Image
People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
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
We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.
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
Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.
May Sarton