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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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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
May Sarton
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It takes a long time for words to become thought.
May Sarton
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Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
May Sarton
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What can I have that I still want?
May Sarton
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Time unbounded is hard to handle.
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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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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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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What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
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Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
May Sarton
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Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.
May Sarton
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What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.
May Sarton
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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
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It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
May Sarton
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The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
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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One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about
May Sarton
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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
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The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
May Sarton
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You will always be here with me As long as I live, A towering figure of love.
May Sarton