Quote

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?

May Sarton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Thing
Belief
Ridiculous
Kind
Rather
Inner
Never
Fact
Private
Would
Facts
Lived
Unmasked
People
Power
Poet
Forbidden
Persons
Stay
Poets
Person
Public
Naked
Better
Since
Requires

More quotes by May Sarton

Image
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
Image
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
Image
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
Image
When addressed, a Gentleman Cat does not move a muscle. He looks as if he hasn't heard.
May Sarton
Image
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.
May Sarton
Image
Love is our human miracle.
May Sarton
Image
I am not ready to die, / But I am learning to trust death / As I have trusted life.
May Sarton
Image
It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
May Sarton
Image
No partner in a love relationship... should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
May Sarton
Image
We have to believe that every person counts, counts as a creative force that can move mountains.
May Sarton
Image
It is possible, I suppose, that we are returning to a Dark Age. What is frightening is that violence is not only represented by nations, but everywhere walks among us freely.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
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).
May Sarton
Image
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
Image
At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.
May Sarton
Image
Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing.
May Sarton
Image
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
Image
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
Image
life is always bringing unexpected gifts.
May Sarton
Image
Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything - except itself.
May Sarton