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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
Personal
Written
Write
Painfully
Writing
Transcend
Always
Poems
Reach
Universal

More quotes by 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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O cruel cloudless space, And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies! Why do we feel restored As in a sacramental place? Here Mystery is artifice, And here a vision of such peace is stored, Healing flows from it through our eyes.
May Sarton
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The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
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It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
May Sarton
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One does not find oneself by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.
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 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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One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
May Sarton
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...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.
May Sarton
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There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
May Sarton
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In the country of pain we are each alone.
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 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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It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.
May Sarton
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Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.
May Sarton
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So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.
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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I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.
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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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton