May Sarton Quotes
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There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
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Gardening is the instrument of grace.
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It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other - there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.
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I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.
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Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.
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I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.
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We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
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It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.
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Fighting dragons is my holy joy.
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life is always bringing unexpected gifts.
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It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.
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have the courage to write whatever your dream is for yourself.
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Growing old is, of all things we experience, that which takes the most courage, and at a time when we have the least resources, especially with which to meet frustration.
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I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.
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The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.
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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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A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.
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Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.
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It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.
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They are commiting murder who merely 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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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
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There the door is always open into the “holy” — growth, birth, death.
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It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
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My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!
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I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
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Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?
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Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
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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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