Quote

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

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
Even
Turned
Kind
Flow
Life
Gift
Backed
Becomes
Unable
Though
Inward
Given
Poison
Sometimes
Burden
Giving
Heavy

More quotes by May Sarton

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You will always be here with me As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
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.
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
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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.
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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton
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Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.
May Sarton
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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
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You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
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Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
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One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about
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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.
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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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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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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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There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
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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Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
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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This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated all is concentrated within.
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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton