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I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.

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
Place
Appear
Naming
Beautiful
Hour
Diaries
Feel
Duty
Duties
Feels
Alive
Journal
Things
Hours
Missed
Half
Aside
Happy
Push
Experience
Keeping
Savor

More quotes by May Sarton

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I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
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I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
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The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
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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.
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
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Gardening is an instrument of grace.
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For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
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For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.
May Sarton
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We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
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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.
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...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.
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A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton
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Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.
May Sarton
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
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It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems our poems choose us.
May Sarton