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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
Poem
Journey
Novel
Arrival
Arrivals
Journal

More quotes by May Sarton

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I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.
May Sarton
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What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
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I suppose I envy painters because they can meditate on form and structure, on color and light, and not concern themselves with human torment and chaos. It is restful even to imagine expression without words.
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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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
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The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
May Sarton
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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 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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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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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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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
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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Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.
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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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
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Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.
May Sarton
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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward
May Sarton
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No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
May Sarton
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This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated all is concentrated within.
May Sarton
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I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton