Quote

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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Hold
Sad
Simply
Demands
May
Depression
Live
Sadness
Sometimes
Endure
Period
Exposes
Periods
Attentive
Demand
Illumination

More quotes by May Sarton

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“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause then she answered, “By thinking.”
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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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
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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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There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
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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The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.
May Sarton
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Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
May Sarton
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It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.
May Sarton
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It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
May Sarton
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Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.
May Sarton
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A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
May Sarton
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The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.
May Sarton
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When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
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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I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
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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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
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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Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton