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

More quotes by 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.
May Sarton
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Gardening is an instrument of grace.
May Sarton
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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
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Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
May Sarton
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The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?
May Sarton
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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?
May Sarton
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Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius.
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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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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In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
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When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
May Sarton
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we are never done with thinking about our parents, I suppose, and come to know them better long after they are dead than we ever did when they were alive.
May Sarton
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Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.
May Sarton
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I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.
May Sarton
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Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
May Sarton
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
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The tragic thing about learning from experience is I fear that one can only learn from one's own experience. Other people's - other nations' - experiences simply do not help. They can be imaginatively learned from. But people do not act on other people's experiences.
May Sarton
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One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
May Sarton