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There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .

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
Women
Interruptions
Able
Chiefly
Sometimes
Dishes
Thing
Temper
Work
Constant
Stand
Hilary
Keep
Interruption
Thought
Consisted

More quotes by May Sarton

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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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The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
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At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
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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?
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Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
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It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
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“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause then she answered, “By thinking.”
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I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
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... 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.
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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
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Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
May Sarton
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An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
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They are commiting murder who merely live.
May Sarton
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I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.
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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
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making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
May Sarton
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It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
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The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.
May Sarton