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What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.

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
Consummation
Drives
Ambition
Desire
Made

More quotes by May Sarton

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“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause then she answered, “By thinking.”
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A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.
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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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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
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.
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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
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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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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
May Sarton
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A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
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
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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
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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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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Am I too old, perhaps, ever to take in another's life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have... and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!
May Sarton
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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
May Sarton
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Gardening is an instrument of grace.
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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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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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton