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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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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Keep
Bed
Moments
Seemed
Real
Clean
Made
Constant
Ashtrays
Things
Battle
Emptied
Never
Ordinary
Exhausting
Life
Asked
Falling
Fall
Apart

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When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
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The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
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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.
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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.
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It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
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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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What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
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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.
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instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
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At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
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Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
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I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.
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The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people.
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“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause then she answered, “By thinking.”
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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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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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Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
May Sarton