Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

A brutal little diagnosis hides inside Sarton’s calm syntax: speech as self-anesthesia. “Most people” is the sharpened blade here, a near-universal without quite becoming a sermon. She’s not romanticizing silence; she’s accusing noise. The line pivots on a pun of attention: talk so they won’t hear. Not “won’t be heard,” but won’t hear at all - the threat is internal. Hearing becomes the real intimacy, the thing people dodge, because it means receiving: other people’s needs, the world’s grief, your own restless inventory.

As a poet, Sarton knows how easily language becomes performance. The subtext is that conversation often functions less as connection than as control: if I’m speaking, I’m setting the temperature, choosing the topic, staying on the surface. The quote lands because it flips the assumed virtue of openness. We treat talking as honesty; Sarton implies it can be camouflage, a way to keep the mind from turning inward or outward in any vulnerable way.

Contextually, it fits a 20th-century literary temperament shaped by modern solitude and psychological scrutiny - an era when therapy-speak was rising, media was getting louder, and private life was being reorganized around constant narration. Sarton’s work often circles interiority, especially the disciplined, sometimes painful practice of being alone without becoming numb. This line is a warning about how quickly “communication” turns into avoidance when we fear what silence would finally make audible.