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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
Matter
Absolute
Ambiguous
Trying
Matters
Crystals
Life
Private
Mixed
Agree
Irrelevant
Fashion
Multiple
Clear
Relevant
May
Privacy
Crystal
Best
Absolutes
Singular

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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?
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At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
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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.
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Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
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life is always bringing unexpected gifts.
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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
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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.
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all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
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You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
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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.
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Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
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And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.
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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
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The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
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a poet never feels useful.
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The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.
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I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
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Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
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