May Sarton

May Sarton
May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton, an American poet, novelist and memoirist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNon-Fiction Author
Date of Birth3 May 1912
CountryUnited States of America
respect self needs
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
self-confidence age weakness
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
self innocence pure
Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed
self class two
... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.
loss self secret
For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?
self people solitude
Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
self long machines
For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go"...
pain intimate-relationships self
When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.
artist self joy
If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.
essential himself love partner scholars-and-scholarship
No partner in a love relationship...should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable.
hour madly single stand stop time
Now there is time and time is young.O, in this single hour I liveAll of myself and do not move.I, the pursued, who madly ran,Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
depression illumination demand
Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
beauty order meditation
The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
american-poet conscious creation order pure relieved
Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.