poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing. May Sarton More Quotes by May Sarton More Quotes From May Sarton 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. May Sarton analysisfeelingsbelieve I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It's not weird if you feel deeply. May Sarton strangewantfeelings Women's work is always toward wholeness. May Sarton wholenessdishes I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand. May Sarton purposewritingthinking It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside. May Sarton curiousfeelsorder It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison. May Sarton effortrealpeople There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. May Sarton balanceacceptanceasking 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 before-deathunderstandinglittles 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. May Sarton feelingswritingcharacter The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it? May Sarton meditationbeautyorder It takes a long time for words to become thought. May Sarton long-timelong 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? May Sarton languagewayneeds 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. May Sarton lightminddark One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are. May Sarton proveelementsage ... love is healing, even rootless love. May Sarton healinglove-is Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists. May Sarton solitudeselfpeople 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. May Sarton halfdiariesbeautiful It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music. May Sarton oceandarkblue 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. May Sarton voicespacesilence 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 experiencehelpingpeople
