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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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Keep
Whole
Stopped
Would
Somewhere
Failure
Duty
Growing
Artist

More quotes by May Sarton

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She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.
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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
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Time unbounded is hard to handle.
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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.
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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
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Love is our human miracle.
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I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
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There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
May Sarton
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There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
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.
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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
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each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
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There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.
May Sarton
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I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
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The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
May Sarton
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The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.
May Sarton
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For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?
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