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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

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
Arrival
Arrivals
Journal
Poem
Journey
Novel

More quotes by May Sarton

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Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
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life is always bringing unexpected gifts.
May Sarton
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It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
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 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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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.
May Sarton
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Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
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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It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems our poems choose us.
May Sarton
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
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
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It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
May Sarton
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Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.
May Sarton
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In the country of pain we are each alone.
May Sarton
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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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Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn.
May Sarton
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For me the moral dilemma this past year has been how to make peace with the unacceptable.
May Sarton