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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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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
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Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
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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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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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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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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For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
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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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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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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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
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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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
May Sarton
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Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
May Sarton
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Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.
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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The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
May Sarton