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Time Quotes by May Sarton

43 Time quotes by May Sarton

All Time quotes May Sarton’s page

May Sarton describes moments of solitude in a strange city and how they can enrich inner life. She laments the rarity of true joy among artists while craving open, obligation‑free time for writing. She also notes that appointments can warp the feeling of time.

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It takes a long time for words to become thought.

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Time unbounded is hard to handle.

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Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.

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Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

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Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

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At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

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making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

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

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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

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“I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love.”

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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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It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.

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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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She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at…

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“For a long time, for years, I have carried in my mind the excruciating image of plants, bulbs, in a cellar, trying…

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The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from…

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Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the…

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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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In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful…

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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or,…

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There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not…

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“There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always towards chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was…

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Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We…

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There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed…

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For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the…

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“The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there…

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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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“In Texas there’s so much space words have a way Of getting lost in the silence before they’re spoken So people hang…

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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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And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the…

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Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past…

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I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness.…

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Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding…

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...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you…

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It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort…

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[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become…

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I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged.…

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“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what…

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This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost…

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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.