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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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
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May Eleanor Sarton
Together
Minds
Indulgence
People
Reason
Poet
Sixty
Firsts
Poetry
Poets
Self
Willing
Breaking
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Right
Feelings
Rare
Keep
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Many
Two
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Mind

More quotes by 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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People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.
May Sarton
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Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
May Sarton
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You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.
May Sarton
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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
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I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.
May Sarton
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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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A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
May Sarton
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
May Sarton
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Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
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Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.
May Sarton
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Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.
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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There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
May Sarton
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Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.
May Sarton
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There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.
May Sarton
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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.
May Sarton
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For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.
May Sarton
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Time unbounded is hard to handle.
May Sarton