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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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Choose
Clear
Poems
Exactly
Poet

More quotes by May Sarton

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You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
May Sarton
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Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
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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[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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For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
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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Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
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I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
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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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
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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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
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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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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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
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A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
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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
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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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Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton