Quote

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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Work
Alive
Account
Made
Point
Insight
Every
Lives
Weather
Seizure
Make
Human
Myth
Seizures
Think
Humans
Accounts
Inexplicable
Thinking
Enough
Grief
Woe
Hard
Turned
Myths
Writing
Discipline
Yield

More quotes by May Sarton

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The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton
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Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
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He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.
May Sarton
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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
May Sarton
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It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
May Sarton
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Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
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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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
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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I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.
May Sarton
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Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
May Sarton
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I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
May Sarton
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If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine - why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity?
May Sarton
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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
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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No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
May Sarton
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instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.
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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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton