Quote

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated all is concentrated within.

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
State
Writer
Concentrated
Times
Strange
Wondered
Lost
Cities
Intensity
Reality
Takes
Entirely
Power
Alone
Travel
States
Written
Speech
Dissipated
Nothing
Within
City
Enriching
Word
Gets
Suspension

More quotes by May Sarton

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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
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The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation....It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental.
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About loving, I have little to learn from the young.
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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
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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.
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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.
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... love is healing, even rootless love.
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.
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Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
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It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems our poems choose us.
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There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.
May Sarton
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I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.
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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
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A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward to reset oneself by an inner compass.
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If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine - why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity?
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
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.
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Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.
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Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
May Sarton
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It takes a long time for words to become thought.
May Sarton