Quote

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
Moments
Seemed
Real
Clean
Made
Constant
Ashtrays
Things
Battle
Emptied
Never
Ordinary
Exhausting
Life
Asked
Falling
Fall
Apart
Keep
Bed

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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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True gardeners cannot bear a glove Between the sure touch and the tender root.
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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 . . .
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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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I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.
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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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Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.
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Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
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a poet never feels useful.
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Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
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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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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
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True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
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I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.
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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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When I am alone the flowers are really seen I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die...they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days they keep me closely in touch with the process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.
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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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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
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