"It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside."
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Quote collection
May Sarton quotes (page 7 of 14)
275 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"[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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"When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard."
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"Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff."
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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."
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"instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion."
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"Absence becomes the greatest Presence."
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"I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love."
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"For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live."
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"In the country of pain we are each alone."
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"What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read."
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"For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis."
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"And I refuse to feel guilty about not letter-writing either. There are times when one can, times when one can't. In the times when an enormous amount of living is going on, one can't."
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"One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?"
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"... love is healing, even rootless love."
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"Women's work is always toward wholeness."
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"life is always bringing unexpected gifts."
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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."
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"True power is given to the vulnerable."
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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."
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