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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.

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
Moment
Moments
Able
Detachment
Laugh
Laughing
Humor
Achieve

More quotes by 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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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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What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.
May Sarton
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It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.
May Sarton
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a poet never feels useful.
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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... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.
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 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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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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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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Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
May Sarton
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
May Sarton
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If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.
May Sarton
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Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
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People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
May Sarton
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It feels a long way up and down from zero.
May Sarton
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Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
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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We only keep what we lose.
May Sarton