Top 100 Quotes About Anne Sexton
#1. I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.
Francesca Lia Block
#2. It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton's voice would be blasting from the speakers. A woman who writes feels too much ...
Augusten Burroughs
#3. 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
#4. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.
Matt Haig
#5. Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.
Joni Mitchell
#6. All the oxygen of the world was in them.
All the feet of the babies of the world were in them.
All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them.
All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.
Anne Sexton
#8. I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
Anne Sexton
#9. The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
Anne Sexton
#10. Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
#11. The man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate ...
Anne Sexton
#12. My sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of myself,
my stung skin as alien
as a loose bolt of cloth.
Anne Sexton
#13. No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.
Anne Sexton
#14. I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Anne Sexton
#15. The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton
#16. I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.
Anne Sexton
#17. I'm in pain because the day is ending and somehow I am never healing.
Anne Sexton
#18. Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
#19. Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Anne Sexton
#20. Now he is gone
as you are gone.
But he belongs to me like lost baggage.
Anne Sexton
#21. I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.
Anne Sexton
#22. What's missing is the eyeballs
in each of us, but it doesn't matter
because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
Anne Sexton
#23. That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry - poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
Anne Sexton
#24. I can only sign over everything,
the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels,
the soul, the family tree, the mailbox.
Then I can sleep.
Maybe.
Anne Sexton
#25. Two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Anne Sexton
#26. There is no word for time.
Today we will
not think to number another summer
or watch its white bird into the ground.
Anne Sexton
#27. I did not know the woman I would be
nor that blood would bloom in me
each month like an exotic flower,
nor that children,
two monuments,
would break from between my legs ...
Anne Sexton
#28. Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
Anne Sexton
#30. 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
#31. I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
#33. 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
#34. Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.
Anne Sexton
#35. And there you are. And I liked you a lot today. A lot. And I want to talk to you. Selfishly.
Anne Sexton
#36. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
Anne Sexton
#37. Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton
#38. Then God spoke to me and said:
People say only good things about Christmas.
If they want to say something bad,
they whisper.
Anne Sexton
#39. 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
#40. It is a dead heart.
It is inside of me.
It is a stranger
yet once it was agreeable,
opening and closing like a clam.
Anne Sexton
#42. Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.
Anne Sexton
#44. Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle ...
Anne Sexton
#45. Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton
#46. Everyone has left me
except my muse,
that good nurse.
She stays in my hand,
a mild white mouse.
Anne Sexton
#47. Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.
Anne Sexton
#48. It is June. I am tired of being brave.
Anne Sexton
#49. 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
#50. You fell, she said, just remember you fell.
I fell, is all he told the doctors
in the big hospital. A nice lady came
and asked him questions but because
he didn't want to be sent away he said, I fell.
He never said anything else although he could talk fine.
Anne Sexton
#51. Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
Counting this row and that row of moccasins
Waiting on the silent shelf.
Anne Sexton
#52. You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies
Anne Sexton
#53. Out of used furniture she made a tree.
Anne Sexton
#54. There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.
Anne Sexton
#55. Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
Anne Sexton
#56. Don't worry if they say you're crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It's a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.
Anne Sexton
#57. The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards ...
Anne Sexton
#58. How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?
Anne Sexton
#59. 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
#61. The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Anne Sexton
#62. True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
Anne Sexton
#63. Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
Anne Sexton
#64. I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
#65. Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.
Anne Sexton
#66. Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
#67. Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone.
Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
Anne Sexton
#68. My heart is on a budget.
It keeps me on the brink.
Anne Sexton
#69. I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
Anne Sexton
#70. 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
#71. One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.
Anne Sexton
#72. Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.
Anne Sexton
#73. 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
#74. To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren't much company.
Anne Sexton
#75. One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
#76. I wonder if the artist ever lives his life
he is so busy recreating it.
Anne Sexton
#77. Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.
Anne Sexton
#78. They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
Anne Sexton
#79. Daisies in water are the longest lasting
flower you can give to someone.
Fact.
Buy daisies.
Not roses.
Anne Sexton
#80. God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
Anne Sexton
#81. One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."
Anne Sexton
#82. All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
Anne Sexton
#83. And then I knew that the voice
of the spirits had been let in
as intense as an epileptic aura
and that no longer would I sing
alone.
Anne Sexton
#84. June and July?
These are the months
we call Boiling Water.
Anne Sexton
#86. I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?
Anne Sexton
#87. Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long ...
Anne Sexton
#88. Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
Anne Sexton
#89. Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.
Anne Sexton
#90. Bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics.
Or form a Piss Club where we all go
in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.
Anne Sexton
#91. She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
Anne Sexton
#92. You see, we live in a cold climate
and are not permitted to kiss on the street
so I made up a song that wasn't true.
I made up a song called Marriage.
Anne Sexton
#93. I see myself as one would see another.
I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
#94. Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
Anne Sexton
#95. 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
#96. A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.
Anne Sexton
#97. The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
Anne Sexton
#98. This is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.
Anne Sexton
#99. 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
#100. Probably I am a fool ... most poets are fools ... but for some reason I love faith, but have none.
Anne Sexton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
