May Sarton

Poet

1912-05-03

Quotes by May Sarton

• And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers,Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

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• But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.

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• So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

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• Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

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• If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?

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• One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

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• When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

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• Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

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• For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

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• I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

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• Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

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• Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

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• I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom

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• Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

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• The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.

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• I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom

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• When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to take in the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

  Read quote

• So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

  Read quote

• Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

  Read quote

• Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

  Read quote