May Sarton Quotes

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.

We need a radically truthful way to acknowledge reproductive freedom.

[Stéphane Mallarmé] theory of the hermetic is a mistake, but he can be only difficult to read when he has difficult things to say.

I'm not that shallow, asshole. I don't need money. It's way more important for them to be good-looking.

.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

You should never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word.

[David Milch] had say, "You have to understand that our history of western movies, what we've been doing in westerns since the movies began to talk, you had audiences that would be offended by certain things, and there was a cleaning-up of the way people spoke."

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else.

I didn't say wonderful, I say eminent domain is something you need Chris. Eminent domain - if I build a highway - go ahead. I know exactly what you're saying. But if I build a highway, and if something's in the way of the highway, you're going to have to do something with that.

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.

The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.

A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn't

You shouldn't need an excuse or a way to ease out.

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. 828

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting [verbal] imagery which I guess is a poetic touch.

If you don't accept yourself, you won't live fully, and if you don't live fully you'll need to get full some other way.