408 Quotes by May Sarton

What is there to do when people die – people so dear and rare – but bring them back by remembering?

Some women would be better off alone, but they feel they’ve got to get hold of someone to prove they’re worth while,” she said, sweeping the air with her arm and clapping her fist into her palm. If they do decide to be alone, part of their loneliness will come from outside, rather than inside. Society will pity them, look down on them.

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time. The apparently measured time has immeasureable space within it, and in this it resembles music. The routine I established.

I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people...

Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed.

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.

It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it – and I do and always have – then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.

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.