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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

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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Life
Private
Mixed
Agree
Irrelevant
Fashion
Multiple
Clear
Relevant
May
Privacy
Crystal
Best
Absolutes
Singular
Matter
Absolute
Ambiguous
Trying
Matters
Crystals

More quotes by May Sarton

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A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.
May Sarton
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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
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The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
May Sarton
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
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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
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Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
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It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
May Sarton
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It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.
May Sarton
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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
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There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
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O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.
May Sarton
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Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
May Sarton
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
May Sarton
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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton
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Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
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More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.
May Sarton
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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
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instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.
May Sarton