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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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Asked
Question
Start
Commensurate
Better
Recognition
Life
Terror
Handle
Realized
Exactly
More quotes by May Sarton
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
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
May Sarton
each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.
May Sarton
I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.
May Sarton
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
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.
May Sarton
One does not find oneself by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.
May Sarton
Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
May Sarton
What can I have that I still want?
May Sarton
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
We are all, whether we know it or not, in search of a way to enrich, to drink during the fizz, to inhale deeper our gifts, in a desperation for some little understanding before death.
May Sarton
Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
May Sarton
If I were to choose one single thing that that would restore Paris to the senses, it would be that strangely sweet, unhealthy smell of the Métro, so very unlike the dank cold or the stuffy heat of subways in New York.
May Sarton
We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.
May Sarton
Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
May Sarton
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
When I am alone the flowers are really seen I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
May Sarton
A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
May Sarton