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

More quotes by May Sarton

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She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.
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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.
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[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .
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More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.
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... love is healing, even rootless love.
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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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The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
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Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
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Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
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Love is our human miracle.
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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.
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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.
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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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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
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It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
May Sarton
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So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.
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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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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There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.
May Sarton
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About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
May Sarton