Top 100 Anne Sexton Quotes
#2. I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.
Anne Sexton
#3. Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
Anne Sexton
#4. I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
Anne Sexton
#5. Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.
Anne Sexton
#6. My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.
Anne Sexton
#8. Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.
Anne Sexton
#9. There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Anne Sexton
#10. You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies
Anne Sexton
#11. Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
Anne Sexton
#12. Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reigning them in like a circus hand ...
Anne Sexton
#13. I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
#14. Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.
Anne Sexton
#15. My safe, safe psychosis is broken.
It was hard.
It was made of stone.
It covered my face like a mask.
But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
#16. Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.
Anne Sexton
#17. For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
Anne Sexton
#18. To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren't much company.
Anne Sexton
#19. I wonder if the artist ever lives his life
he is so busy recreating it.
Anne Sexton
#21. I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?
Anne Sexton
#22. Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long ...
Anne Sexton
#23. I see myself as one would see another.
I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
#24. She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear
the fear of sleep.
Briar Rose
was an insomniac ...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence.
Anne Sexton
#25. The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
Anne Sexton
#26. I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,
the whole U.S.,
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
Anne Sexton
#27. Oh thumb,
I want a drink
it is dark,
where are the big people,
when will I get there ... ?
Anne Sexton
#28. Yet love enters my blood like an I.V.,
dripping in its little white moments.
Anne Sexton
#29. I'd won the world
but like a
forsaken explorer,
I'd lost
my map.
Anne Sexton
#30. Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
Anne Sexton
#31. Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
Anne Sexton
#32. The children are all crying in their pens
and the surf carries their cries away.
They are old men who have seen too much,
their mouths are full of dirty clothes,
the tongues poverty, tears like puss.
The surf pushes their cries back.
Listen.
Anne Sexton
#33. And my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
Anne Sexton
#34. I will be steel!
I will build a steel bridge over my need!
I will build a bomb shelter over my heart!
But my future is a secret.
It is as shy as a mole.
Anne Sexton
#35. I would sell my life to avoid
the pain that begins in the crib
with its bars or perhaps
with your first breath
when the planets drill
your future into you ...
Anne Sexton
#37. You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
Anne Sexton
#38. I remember the stink of the liverwurst.
How I was put on a platter and laid
between the mayonnaise and the bacon.
The rhythm of the refrigerator
had been disturbed.
Anne Sexton
#39. The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts or traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.
Anne Sexton
#40. Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.
Anne Sexton
#41. The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
Anne Sexton
#42. Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
Anne Sexton
#43. Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.
Anne Sexton
#44. For forty days, for forty nights
Jesus put one foot in front of the other
and the man he carried,
if it was a man,
became heavier and heavier.
Anne Sexton
#45. Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Anne Sexton
#46. I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman's yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
Anne Sexton
#47. Everyone in me is a bird
I am beating all my wings
Anne Sexton
#48. My life
has appeared unclothed in court,
detail by detail,
death-bone witness by death-bone witness,
and I was shamed at the verdict ...
Anne Sexton
#49. There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning ...
Anne Sexton
#50. I love the word warm.
It is almost unbearable
so moist and breathlike.
Anne Sexton
#51. I am surprised to see
that the ocean is still going on.
Anne Sexton
#52. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children ... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
#53. And within the house
ashes are being stuffed into my marriage,
fury is lapping the walls,
dishes crack on the shelves,
a strangler needs my throat,
the daughter has ceased to eat anything ...
Anne Sexton
#54. Father,
you died once,
salted down at fifty-nine,
packed down like a big snow angel,
wasn't that enough?
Anne Sexton
#55. Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Anne Sexton
#56. I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton
#57. When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
Anne Sexton
#58. All in all, I'd say,
the world is strangling.
And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes
converse about it.
And the moon,
under its dark hood,
falls out of the sky each night,
with its hungry red mouth
to suck at my scars.
Anne Sexton
#59. With this pen I take in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
#60. Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.
Anne Sexton
#61. I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows,
waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home
and stuff me so full of our infected child
that I turn invisible, but married,
at last.
Anne Sexton
#62. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
Anne Sexton
#64. God has a brown voice, soft and full as beer.
Anne Sexton
#65. Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like ... you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
Anne Sexton
#66. Rocks crumble, make new forms,
oceans move the continents,
mountains rise up and down like ghosts
yet all is natural, all is change.
Anne Sexton
#67. Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry
and He said, Oh Lord,
send down a short-order cook.
Anne Sexton
#68. What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Anne Sexton
#69. Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
Anne Sexton
#70. Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Anne Sexton
#71. Home is my Bethlehem,
my succoring shelter,
my mental hospital,
my wife, my dam,
my husband, my sir,
my womb, my skull.
Anne Sexton
#72. Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne Sexton
#73. I'll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.
Anne Sexton
#74. You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines,
all this leprous day and then more vodka,
more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies,
the pond sucking out the throb.
Anne Sexton
#75. Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are ...
Anne Sexton
#76. When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet
it is my other who sits in a ball and cries.
My other beats a tin drum in my heart.
My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep.
My other cries and cries and cries
when I put on a cocktail dress.
Anne Sexton
#77. There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God give milk
and I have the pail.
Anne Sexton
#78. Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.
Anne Sexton
#80. Yes, I know.
Death sits with his key in my lock.
Not one day is taken for granted.
Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
Anne Sexton
#81. He said loudly 'I am not dying' and I said 'for me you are.
Anne Sexton
#82. The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
Anne Sexton
#83. I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.
Anne Sexton
#84. It's all a matter of history.
Brandy is no solace.
Librium only lies me down
like a dead snow queen.
Yes! I am still the criminal.
Anne Sexton
#85. I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Anne Sexton
#86. The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
Anne Sexton
#87. I put the gold star up in the front window
beside the flag. Alterations is what I know
and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
Anne Sexton
#88. We were fair game
but we have kept out of the cesspool.
We are strong.
We are the good ones.
Do not discover us
for we lie together all in green
like pond weeds.
Hold me, my young dear, hold me.
Anne Sexton
#89. Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.
Anne Sexton
#90. Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice ...
Anne Sexton
#91. Man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.
Anne Sexton
#92. I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything. Anne Sexton, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958)
Anne Sexton
#93. Our bodies were trash.
We leave them on the shore.
Anne Sexton
#95. I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
Anne Sexton
#96. Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.
Anne Sexton
#97. When I lie down to love,
old dwarf heart shakes her head.
Like an imbecile she was born old.
Anne Sexton
#98. No matter whose bed you die in
the bed will be yours
for your voyage
onto the surgical andiron
of God.
Anne Sexton
#99. The fish are naked.
The fish are always awake.
They are the color of old spoons
and caramels.
Anne Sexton
#100. Love your self's self where it lives.
Anne Sexton
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