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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward

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
Begins
Forward
Inspiration
Age
Rather
Looks
Real
Backward
Suppose

More quotes by May Sarton

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Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
May Sarton
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We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.
May Sarton
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Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
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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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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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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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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For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
May Sarton
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The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
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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For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton
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Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
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My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
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Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
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Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
May Sarton
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I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
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Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
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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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton