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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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Partly
Formal
Poems
Poem
Literature
Energy
Propelled
History
Preceded
Energies

More quotes by 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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It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
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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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton
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How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.
May Sarton
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A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
May Sarton
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Does one come to enjoy even the hardships that help make one the person one is? Or is it that the past becomes a legend to be remembered with laughter?
May Sarton
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It feels a long way up and down from zero.
May Sarton
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About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
May Sarton
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An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
May Sarton
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The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
May Sarton
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Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
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What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
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There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.
May Sarton
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
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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[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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Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
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The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth.
May Sarton