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

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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.
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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
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I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
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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.
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It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness?
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Your poems will happen when no one is there.
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Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
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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.
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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.
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It feels a long way up and down from zero.
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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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It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
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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.
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For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live.
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all great people are humble because great people have great work and are humbled by the largeness of their dreams.
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Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.
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Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.
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May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant that is what matters.
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