May Sarton - Person Quotes

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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?

May Sarton
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
It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.

May Sarton
It is always hard to hear the buried truth from another person.

May Sarton
I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.'

May Sarton
I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.

May Sarton
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.

May Sarton
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
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

May Sarton
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.

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

May Sarton
Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.

May Sarton
It is a waste of time to see people who have only a social surface to show. I will make every effort to find out the real person, but if I can't, then I am upset and cross. Time wasted is poison.

May Sarton