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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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For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
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It takes a long time for words to become thought.
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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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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I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
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We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
May Sarton
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
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When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
May Sarton
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Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe.
May Sarton
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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
May Sarton
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The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
May Sarton
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Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
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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we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
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
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So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.
May Sarton
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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
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I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life.
May Sarton
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Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
May Sarton
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The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton