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Poetry Quotes by May Sarton

45 Poetry quotes by May Sarton

All Poetry quotes May Sarton’s page

May Sarton writes to discover what she thinks and feels. She says poems choose the writer, not the other way around, and that true poems appear when a question haunts her like an angel. She also notes that joy does not change with age and that compromise can kill poetry but helps cooperation.

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Time spent with poets is never wasted.

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Your poems will happen when no one is there.

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“But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.”

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One of the springs of poetry is joy.

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a poet never feels useful.

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Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

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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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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

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It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

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poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

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Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

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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…

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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…

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The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break…

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I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

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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 am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I…

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The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon,…

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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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Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the…

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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…

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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…

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... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to…

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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…

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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…

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I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years…

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One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age.…

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I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild…

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“I loved them in the way one loves at any age — if it’s real at all — obsessively, painfully, with wild…

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“Now I become myself. It's taken Time, may years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces, Run…

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“When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me—that a person may be ultrasensitive and not…

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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

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“...when the petals fall Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well”

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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…

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When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like…

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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…

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I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for…

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“It is time I came back to my real life After this voyage to an island with no name, Where I lay…

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More by May Sarton

“I felt pain like an assault, The old pain again When the world thrusts itself inside, When we have to take in the outside,…

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

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

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…

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it…

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

“I see you with that shell Held to your sensitive abstracted ear, Hunting the ocean’s rumor till you hear it well, Until you can…

There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.

I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope…

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

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

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.