May Sarton Quotes

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.

You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

Musings The little poets sing of little things: Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings; Lovers who kissed and then were made as one, And modest flowers waving in the sun. The mighty poets write in blood and tears And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears. They reach their mad blind hands into the night, To plumb abysses dead to human sight; To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled, Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world. [click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]

The poet's pen is the true divining rod Which trembles towards the inner founts of feeling; Bringing to light and use, else hid from all, The many sweet clear sources which we have of good and beauty in our own deep bosoms; And marks the variations of all mind As does the needle.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

You have to search the absolute demons of your soul to make a great record.

There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

A poet is a painter of the soul.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.

If I knew what I was doing, I'd be doing it right now. I would be the best damn poet, silver words out of my mouth. My words might not be magic, but they cut straight to the truth. So if you need a lover and a friend, baby, I'm in.

All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.

I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.