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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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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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In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton
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We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
May Sarton
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Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
May Sarton
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
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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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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You will always be here with me As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
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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We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
May Sarton
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It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.
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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It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
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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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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Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
May Sarton
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Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.
May Sarton
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The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
May Sarton
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Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
May Sarton
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Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?
May Sarton