May Sarton - Power Quotes

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I no longer have any distant hopes, anything ahead that I look forward to with a leap of the heart.... A trajectory, the sense I had of myself and my own powers, has been broken.

May Sarton
It's extraordinary how little two people can understand each other and how cruel two people who are fond of each other can be to each other — there is practically no cruelty so awful because their power to hurt is so great.

May Sarton
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
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.

May Sarton
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
It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.

May Sarton
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

May Sarton