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May Sarton

May Sarton (May 3, 1912-July 16, 1995) was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist born in Wondelgem, Belgium. Many of her novels and poems are pellucid reflections of the lesbian experience

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There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

– May Sarton

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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.

– May Sarton

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I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. I am still pursued by a neurosis about work inherited from my father. A day where one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.

– May Sarton

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I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep… Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.

– May Sarton

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In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

– May Sarton

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It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

– 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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May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best -- out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

– May Sarton

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Most people have to talk so they won't hear.

– May Sarton

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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

– May Sarton

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Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

– May Sarton

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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.

– May Sarton

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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.

– May Sarton

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There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

– May Sarton

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Though friendship is not quick to burn, It is explosive stuff.

– 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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We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.

– May Sarton

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Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be.

– May Sarton

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