Top 100 Sexton Quotes
#1. What is a church?-Our honest sexton tells, 'Tis a tall building, with a tower and bells.
George Crabbe
#2. 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
#3. Come on, man ... Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published.
Paul Giamatti
#4. He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious. He who seeks to become sexton of a finished cathedral is already defeated.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#5. January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, march with grief doth howl and rave, and April weeps
but, O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#6. Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. Sexton: I think the whole world's gone mad.
Death: Uh-uh. It's always like this. You probably just don't get out enough.
Neil Gaiman
#8. Of course. I was on the run from evil spirits that wanted to kill me and now, according to the local paper, the law. Yet Richard Smith, cemetery sexton and death deity scholar, had a book for me to read in all my copious spare time.
Meg Cabot
#11. 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
#12. I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again - it is hers yet - he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air blew on it ...
Emily Bronte
#13. 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
#14. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.
Matt Haig
#15. Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.
Joni Mitchell
#16. Griffin: Dude! You get to film-fuck Sienna Sexton! High five!
S.C. Stephens
#17. 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
#18. It had rained on some vivid green ferns in Maine and it was quite beautiful. I was moving the camera slightly and studying the ground glass. Looking at those 20 square inches, trying to find out just what were the right elements to include.
John Sexton
#20. I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
Anne Sexton
#21. The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
Anne Sexton
#22. Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
#23. The man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate ...
Anne Sexton
#24. 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
#25. I've never seen a surface that I think is more seductive in image making.
John Sexton
#26. No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.
Anne Sexton
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room.
Brent Sexton
#30. I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.
Anne Sexton
#31. I'm in pain because the day is ending and somehow I am never healing.
Anne Sexton
#32. Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
#33. Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Anne Sexton
#34. Now he is gone
as you are gone.
But he belongs to me like lost baggage.
Anne Sexton
#35. 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
#36. Maybe Angelo was right. Maybe there was something. I still suspected it was the wine.
Marie Sexton
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. As I consider myself nothing nor nobody more than Peter Sellers in Being There or at my liveliest as Inspector Clousseau, it is difficult to make "Susie" sound interesting?
Susie Duncan Sexton
#41. Two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Anne Sexton
#42. 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
#43. When I teach and meet a class for the first time, you realize that there are people there that have exceptional abilities or have the potential to do exceptional things and you never know who those people are. My job is to provide the best information I can.
John Sexton
#44. 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
#45. Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
Anne Sexton
#47. 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
#48. I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
#50. I've found even after nearly 30 years of doing this, there are all kinds of new surprises that rear their heads at various times and I truly believe that 51% of the images, success takes place in the darkroom.
John Sexton
#51. 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
#52. Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.
Anne Sexton
#53. And there you are. And I liked you a lot today. A lot. And I want to talk to you. Selfishly.
Anne Sexton
#54. Just because it offends you doesn't mean it violates your rights. You don't have a right to not be offended
Marie Sexton
#55. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
Anne Sexton
#56. We all start in this medium because of the magic and the challenge is to keep it going.
John Sexton
#57. Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.
Anne Sexton
#63. Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening.
John Sexton
#65. Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle ...
Anne Sexton
#66. Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton
#67. Everyone has left me
except my muse,
that good nurse.
She stays in my hand,
a mild white mouse.
Anne Sexton
#68. I been in plenty of fights and even more almost-fights. It's all about posturin'. You just gotta act tough."
"What if it didn't work? What if he took a swing at you?"
"Sensai say, 'Big like door, swift like glacier'.
Marie Sexton
#69. First, you don't have to be smart to read books. Lots of idiots read books. Trust me, the ability to read does not necessarily mean the ability to think.
Marie Sexton
#70. Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.
Anne Sexton
#71. I have a sudden urge to pitch a tent in the back yard
tonight.
Marie Sexton
#72. It is June. I am tired of being brave.
Anne Sexton
#73. He liked his souls devout. No Unitarians for him.
Marie Sexton
#74. 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
#75. My brother's an aerospace engineer who works for Boeing, and I started thinking, 'Well, my brother works nine hours a day at his job ... What if I worked nine hours a day at being an actor?'
Brent Sexton
#76. 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
#77. Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
Counting this row and that row of moccasins
Waiting on the silent shelf.
Anne Sexton
#78. You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies
Anne Sexton
#79. Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!
John Sexton
#80. To me, photography is 90% a retrospective experience. There's the part of pursuing the image, and exposing the film, but once you make the exposure, you're always looking backwards in time. I like that aspect of photography.
John Sexton
#81. Out of used furniture she made a tree.
Anne Sexton
#82. There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.
Anne Sexton
#83. Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
Anne Sexton
#84. 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
#85. The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards ...
Anne Sexton
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. The thing about grief is that it's a roller coaster - it's up, it's down. The emotions sometimes take over.
Brent Sexton
#91. 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
#92. Maybe, although my heart
is a kitten of butter,
I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
Anne Sexton
#93. The reason I do workshops is so I can learn, and I am fortunate that I've probably gained more from the whole experience of teaching than any one participant has. It is all about asking.
John Sexton
#94. I support any procedure that allows photographers to express themselves, whether that involves color, black and white, platinum, palladium and digital technology.
John Sexton
#95. I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
#96. Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.
Anne Sexton
#97. In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.
John Sexton
#98. Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
#99. 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
#100. My heart is on a budget.
It keeps me on the brink.
Anne Sexton
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