Quote

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

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
Thinking
Pain
Cause
Happenings
Human
Joy
Discover
Humans
Question
Connections
Matter
Humanity
Significant
Isolates
Enough
Causes
Happening
Curiously
Way
Maybe
Draws
Whereas
Make
Happiness
Beings
Extent
Think
Force
Beyond
Forces

More quotes by May Sarton

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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.
May Sarton
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People who cannot feel punish those who do.
May Sarton
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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.
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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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
May Sarton
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letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.
May Sarton
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Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
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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making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
May Sarton
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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
May Sarton
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What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
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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A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
May Sarton
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Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
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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For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
May Sarton
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True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
May Sarton
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I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.
May Sarton
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Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton
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And one cold starry night / Whatever your belief / The phoenix will take flight / Over the seas of grief / To sing her thrilling song / To stars and waves and sky / For neither old nor young / The phoenix does not die.
May Sarton