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For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.

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
Make
Unacceptable
Dilemma
Year
Moral
Peace
Past

More quotes by May Sarton

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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
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A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
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We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
May Sarton
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How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.
May Sarton
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I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
May Sarton
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An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
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Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
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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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.
May Sarton
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It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.
May Sarton
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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
May Sarton
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The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.
May Sarton
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There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
May Sarton
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There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
May Sarton
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Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?
May Sarton
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Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton