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instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

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
Disillusion
Followed
Intimacy
Instant
Often

More quotes by May Sarton

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Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
May Sarton
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In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton
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My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
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It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
May Sarton
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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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For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
May Sarton
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[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .
May Sarton
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The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
May Sarton
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People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
May Sarton
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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
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True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
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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letters are so much easier than living. One can give one's best.
May Sarton
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An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
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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It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.
May Sarton
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... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.
May Sarton
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About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
May Sarton
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The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.
May Sarton