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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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In the very long run any success devours — and perhaps also corrupts.
May Sarton
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Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton
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We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
May Sarton
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Innocence is not pure so much as pleased,
Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed,
But bursts into tears at a harsh word.
May Sarton
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Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.
May Sarton
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Making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.
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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It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
May Sarton
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I am brooding on the book and think there must be a pause to let things come, not to force them. But I am not suited to pauses. When I can't work I feel miserable, a worm.
May Sarton
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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.
May Sarton
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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?
May Sarton
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Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old! The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
May Sarton
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When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.
May Sarton
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I simply adore being alone — I find it a consuming thirst — and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.
May Sarton
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I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.
May Sarton
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Words are my passion
And out of them and me
I would create beauty.
May Sarton
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O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice,
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes.
May Sarton
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I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
May Sarton
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There is a wilder solitude in winter
When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
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I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.
May Sarton
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It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful, and always, she had to admit, interesting.
May Sarton
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Being very rich as far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.
May Sarton
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Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.
May Sarton
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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
May Sarton
Born:
May 3, 1912
Died:
July 16, 1995
(aged 83)
Bio:
May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton, an American poet, novelist and memoirist.
Known for:
Journal of a Solitude (1973)
Plant Dreaming Deep (1968)
At Seventy (1984)
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965)
As we are now (1973)
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