May Sarton Quotations

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

They are commiting murder who merely live.

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.

I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.

For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live ...

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

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.

Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.

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.