May Sarton - Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965)

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

May Sarton
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
Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know... if one is honest.

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

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

May Sarton
So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, in blood, in time.

May Sarton
Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

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
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
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

May Sarton
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

May Sarton
You can't break the mould and also be consoled for breaking it, old fool!

May Sarton