May Sarton Quotes

“I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.”
― May Sarton

“Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?
I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space - all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“I too have known the inward disturbance of exile,
The great peril of being at home nowhere,
The dispersed center, the dividing love;
Not here, nor there, leaping across ocean,
Turning, returning to each strong allegiance;
American, but with this difference - parting.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through - the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or another.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?
I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.”
― May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

“Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

(Quote in his book taken from Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, page 101)”
― John Le Carré, The Russia House