Eleanore Marie Sarton (1912–95,) known by the pen name May Sarton, was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.
Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium; her father was a science historian and her mother, an artist. Her parents fled the German invasion during World War I and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Sarton was three years old. She wrote poetry at a young age and got a series of sonnets published in the Poetry magazine when she was just 18 years old.
Sarton was very prolific and produced nearly 50 volumes of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Her journals and memoirs are considered her best-known writings. Her novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) is often referred to as her “coming out” novel. Writing about homosexuality, she worried, justifiably, would get her categorized or even rejected as a “lesbian writer,” and for many years to come, that’s precisely what happened.
Sarton’s memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) has been called “the watershed in women’s autobiography.” This book, as the rest of her journals, is characterized by honest accounts of aging, loneliness, love and relationships, lesbianism, self-doubt, success and failure, and the persistent struggles of a creative life.
American novelist and biographer Margot Peters wrote a contentious biography (1998) that portrayed May Sarton as a complex individual who often struggled in her relationships.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by May Sarton
Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.
—May Sarton
Topics: Speaking, Speakers
Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself.
—May Sarton
Topics: Gardening
I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
—May Sarton
Topics: Giving
Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
—May Sarton
Topics: Relaxation
In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
—May Sarton
Topics: Failure
There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gifts to those one loves most.
—May Sarton
Topics: Giving, Charity
May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best—out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.
—May Sarton
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child’s mind, the are not easily eradicated.
—May Sarton
Topics: Mind
Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.
—May Sarton
Topics: Friendship
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
—May Sarton
Topics: Heroism, Heroes/Heroism, Humanity, Heroes
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn’t there.
—May Sarton
Topics: Self Respect, Self-respect
The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the “creative” is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
—May Sarton
Topics: Creativity
One does not “find oneself” by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine … who one is and wants to be.
—May Sarton
Topics: Being True to Yourself
It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!
—May Sarton
Topics: Love
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
—May Sarton
Topics: Argument
One thing is certain, and I have always known it—they joys of my life have nothing to do with age.
—May Sarton
Topics: Joy
A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
—May Sarton
Topics: Home
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
—May Sarton
Topics: Gardening
Don’t forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.
—May Sarton
Topics: Babies
Joy, happiness … we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections … to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.
—May Sarton
Topics: Joy, Humanity
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
—May Sarton
Topics: Expectation
It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
—May Sarton
Topics: Strength
A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It’s the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.
—May Sarton
Topics: Engineering, Talent
Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then clusters when there is hardly time to breathe.
—May Sarton
Topics: Difficulty
I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.
—May Sarton
Topics: Aging
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
—May Sarton
Topics: Expectations, Realization, Realistic Expectations, Acceptance, Awareness
Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.
—May Sarton
Topics: Solitude
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
—May Sarton
Topics: Solitude
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
—May Sarton
Topics: Challenges, Risk
For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.
—May Sarton
Topics: Art
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Sarah Orne Jewett American Children’s Books Writer
Ursula K. Le Guin Science-fiction writer
Carl Sandburg American Poet, Historian
Marie Chapian American Christian Writer
e. e. cummings American Poet, Writer, Painter
Nikki Giovanni American Poet, Writer
Phyllis McGinley American Children’s Books Writer
Elizabeth Prentiss American Children’s Books Writer
James Whitcomb Riley American Children’s Books Writer
Shel Silverstein American Cartoonist, Author