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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

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
Opposites
Minutes
Comes
Certain
Mind
Utters
Certainty
Opposite
Minute

More quotes by May Sarton

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each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May Sarton
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I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.
May Sarton
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Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?
May Sarton
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
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Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
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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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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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
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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The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.
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 dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
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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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
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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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
May Sarton
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I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
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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The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
May Sarton
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I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.
May Sarton