"Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them."
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Quote collection
May Sarton quotes (page 9 of 14)
275 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature."
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"Without anxiety life would have very little savor."
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"In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival."
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"...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss."
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"Time spent with poets is never wasted."
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"Excellence costs a great deal."
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"What can I have that I still want?"
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"It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength."
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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?"
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"I am realizing once and for all the difference as far as I am concerned of women and men and the necessity for both. With a man, however tender he is, one is feeding him - one is always and eternally understanding, mothering, supplying him with faith in himself (not in you)."
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"I suppose one has to remember that 'life' is important too, though it's something I forget in some moods, everything except work seeming like an interruption or really non-life."
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"“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”"
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"In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance."
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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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"I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people."
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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."
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"a poet never feels useful."
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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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"This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within."
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