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One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

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
Done
Revising
Prose
Whereas
Poem
Page
Pages
Forever
Point

More quotes by May Sarton

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When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
May Sarton
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It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
May Sarton
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
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 more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
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 minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
May Sarton
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Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
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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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
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We only keep what we lose.
May Sarton
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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
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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
May Sarton
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The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.
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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instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.
May Sarton
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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
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I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.
May Sarton
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In the garden the door is always open into the holy - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.
May Sarton
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making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
May Sarton