"Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard."
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Quote collection
May Sarton quotes (page 12 of 14)
275 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre."
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"Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe."
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"I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling."
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"Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?"
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"For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?"
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"Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light."
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"Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?"
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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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"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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"Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family."
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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."
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"in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts."
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"More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it."
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"I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself."
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"Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time."
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"So let the world go, but hold fast to joy."
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"For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer."
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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."
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"I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!"
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