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In the country of pain we are each alone.

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
Alone
Pain
Country

More quotes by 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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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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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
May Sarton
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I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
May Sarton
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What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
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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“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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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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Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.
May Sarton
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In the garden the door is always open into the holy - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
May Sarton
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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.
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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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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It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.
May Sarton
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Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
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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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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When I am alone the flowers are really seen I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
May Sarton