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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

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
Universal
Personal
Written
Write
Writing
Painfully
Always
Transcend
Poems
Reach

More quotes by 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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How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.
May Sarton
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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.
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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Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
May Sarton
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life is always bringing unexpected gifts.
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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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 only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.
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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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton
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Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
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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There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
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 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.
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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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton
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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 . . .
May Sarton
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I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
May Sarton