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For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.

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
Conflict
Comfort
Strength
Dies
Live
Desperate
Discover

More quotes by May Sarton

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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
May Sarton
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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
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Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
May Sarton
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Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
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 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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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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I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
May Sarton
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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
May Sarton
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It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
May Sarton
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Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
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They are commiting murder who merely live.
May Sarton
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May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant that is what matters.
May Sarton
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Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
May Sarton
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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
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I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton