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May Sarton
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“They are commiting murder who merely live.”
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“In Texas the lid blew off the sky a long time ago / So there's nothing to keep the wind from blowing / And it blows all the time.”
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“Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.”
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“Absence becomes the greatest Presence.”
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“It takes a long time for words to become thought ... ”
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“We only keep what we lose.”
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“For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live ... ”
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“Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, / Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed, / But bursts into tears at a harsh word.”
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“I come to you with only this straight gaze. / These are not hours of fire but years of praise. / The glass full to the brim, completely full. / But held in balance so no drop can spill.”
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“... beaming like a lesser god, / He bounced upon the earth he trod. ”
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“Did someone say that there would be an end, / an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning? / What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled, / not the gift ungiven. / Now the dead move through all of us still glowing. / Mother and child, lover and lover mated, / are wound and bound together and enflowing. / What has been plaited cannot be unplaited — / only the strands grow richer with each loss / and memory makes kings and queens of us. / Dark into light, light into darkness, spin. / When all the birds have flown to some real haven, / we who find shelter in the warmth within, / listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven, / as the lost human voices speak through us and blend / our complex love, our mourning without end.”
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“... solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.”
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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.”
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“... I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.”
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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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“This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.”
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“Fire is a good companion for the mind ... ”
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“What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.”
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“How grow from peace all that we wish to grow? / It is no small task. At last we have come / To plant our anguish and make for it a home.”
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“Excellence costs a great deal.”
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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.”
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“She spoke academese, a language that springs like Athene from an intellectual brow, and she spoke it with a nonregional, 'good' accent.”
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“What's beautiful about the life of a poet is that it is still gratuitous. No one, not even Robert Frost, is able to earn a living only through publishing poetry. The only reason for writing poetry is because you have to, because it is what gives you joy. At best even glory is a by-product. Write because you need to find out what you really mean; write because you want to define your experience and because you want to communicate it to your friends. If they turn out someday to be counted in thousands, then you are lucky. But you are lucky now to have the wish, and to begin to learn about the skill, to do what in any age, in any country, very, very few people ever achieve. So let me welcome you, dear young poet, not into the conpany of angels, but into the great company of those who work for joy alone, the poets.”
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“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
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“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”
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“It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person ... ”
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“... a poet never feels useful.”
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“... don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!”
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“People who cannot feel punish those who do.”
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“The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.”
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“So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.”
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“Women's work is always toward wholeness.”
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“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
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“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting.”
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“Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.”
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“Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.”
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“Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.”
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“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.”
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“In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.”
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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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“You can't break the mould and also be consoled for breaking it, old fool!”
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“True power is given to the vulnerable.”
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“ There is a wilder solitude in winter / When every sense is pricked alive and keen ... ”
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“True gardeners cannot bear a glove / Between the sure touch and the tender root.”
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“At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.”
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“Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.”
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“Flowers and plants are silence presences; they nourish every sense except the ear ... ”
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“It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.”
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“Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.”
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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.”
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“Old age is a great trial, John. One has to be so damned good!”
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“Your poems will happen when no one is there.”
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“Love cannot exorcise the gifts of hate. / Hate cannot exorcize what has no weight, / But laughter we can never over-rate.”
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“Though friendship is not quick to burn, / It is explosive stuff ... ”
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“If I can let you go as trees let go / ... Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep, / The strong root still alive under the snow, / Love will endure — if I can let you go.”
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“There are some griefs so loud / They could bring down the sky, / And there are griefs so still / None knows how deep they lie ... ”
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“I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.”
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“Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.”
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“Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way. ”
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“How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!”
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“There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.”
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“... 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.”
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“I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become ... But there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.”
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“No partner in a love relationship (whether homo- or heterosexual) should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.”
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“Gardening is an instrument of grace. ”
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“It always comes back to the same thing: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.”
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“When it comes to the important things one is always alone ... ”
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“Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and some pure foolishness.”
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“The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.”
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“A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.”
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“What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.”
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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.'”
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“The season is changeable, fitful, and maddening as I am myself these days that are cloaked with too many demands and engagements.”
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“Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.”
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“I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.”
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“Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.”
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“I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.”
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“We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.”
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“There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.”
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“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”
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“Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.”
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“I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!”
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“... I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.”
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“Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?”
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“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.”
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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.”
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“... instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.”
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“A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.”
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“... 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.”
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“Solitude swells the inner space / Like a balloon. / We are wafted hither and thither / On the air currents. / How to land it?”
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“I did not come here for society / In these years / When every meeting is collision, / The impact huge, / The reverberations slow to die down.”
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“I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.”
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“Now we have buried the face we never knew, / Now we have silenced the voice we never heard, / Now he is dead we look on him with awe ... ”
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“... love is healing, even rootless love.”
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“I tell you the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.”
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“... making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.”
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“I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.”
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“... I no longer have any distant hopes, anything ahead that I look forward to with a leap of the heart. ... A trajectory, the sense I had of myself and my own powers, has been broken.”
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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.”
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“In the country of pain we are each alone.”
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“... one of the springs of poetry is joy ... ”
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“... each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.”
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“Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech ... ”
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“It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.”
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“My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.”
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“For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.”
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“For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.'”
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“Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.”
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“A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward, to reset oneself by an inner compass.”
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“... we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.”
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“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.”
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“ The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.”
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“I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.”
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“I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward ... ”
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“Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?”
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“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself ... ”
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“... gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.”
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“Under their weight of bloom / And ninety springs / Flow through her upstairs room, / And memory sings.”
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“And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.”
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“Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe ... ”
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“Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.”
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“In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.”
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“... have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.”
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“For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.”
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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.”
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“Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.”
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“... in the very long run any success devours — and perhaps also corrupts.”
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“I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.”
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“I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.”
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“Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.”
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“Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.”
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“... all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.”
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“Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.”
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“One must always get away to taste experience. One must always escape from people one loves in order to love them. Isn't it queer?”
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“I am brooding on the book and think there must be a pause to let things come, not to force them. But I am not suited to pauses. When I can't work I feel miserable, a worm.”
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“I simply adore being alone — I find it a consuming thirst — and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.”
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“In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.”
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“I was kept awake half the night by a rather loud inexperienced nightingale, and finally took a sedative (the first time I've used one).”
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“... letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.”
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“Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?”
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“More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.”
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“... when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.”
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“Love is our human miracle.”
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“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 ... ”
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“One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.”
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“My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!”
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“It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.”
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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.”
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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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“I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry — I am writing a lot.”
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“Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.”
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“It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other — there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.”
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“I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him — one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).”
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“If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.”
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“ I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials. ”
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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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“... poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.”
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“ ... over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification — but how will that come about?”
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“ A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating — the brink of a voice and never a voice.”
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“And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't.”
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“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.”
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“What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.”
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“... life is always bringing unexpected gifts.”
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“... I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people ... ”
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“Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.”
May Sarton, Belgian-born U.S. writer, poet
(1912 - 1995)
Real name: Eleanore Marie Sarton