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For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

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
Mercurial
Weakness
Inside
Age
Spirit
Ever

More quotes by 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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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
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all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
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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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.
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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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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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton
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I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
May Sarton
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In the garden the door is always open into the holy - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
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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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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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
May Sarton
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The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.
May Sarton
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Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.
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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There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
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.
May Sarton
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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.
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