May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995), an American poet, novelist and memoirist.
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die. . . they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
when I am working I immediately feel hopeful.
It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
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.
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.
Fire is a good companion for the mind.
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.
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'?
If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.
Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.
Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.
a poet never feels useful.
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.
In the garden the door is always open into the holy.
How slowly one comes to understand anything!