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

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about
May Sarton
Image
Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!
May Sarton
Image
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
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
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
May Sarton
Image
Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
May Sarton
Image
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
May Sarton
Image
Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
May Sarton
Image
It feels a long way up and down from zero.
May Sarton
Image
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
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
They are commiting murder who merely live.
May Sarton
Image
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
Image
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.
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
It takes a long time for words to become thought.
May Sarton
Image
What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.
May Sarton
Image
... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.
May Sarton