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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
Failure
Duty
Growing
Artist
Keep
Whole
Would
Stopped
Somewhere

More quotes by May Sarton

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For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
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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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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.
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
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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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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.
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A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
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Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.
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Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
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Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
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I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you).
May Sarton
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The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
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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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.
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I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
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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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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At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
May Sarton
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The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
May Sarton