Anne Sexton quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

  • Death's in the good-bye.

  • It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

  • 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.

  • God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.

  • unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.

  • He turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)

  • I lay there silently,hoarding my small dignity.I did not ask about the gate or the closet.I did not question the bedtime ritualwhere, on the cold bathroom tiles,I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.I did not knowthat my bones,those solids, those pieces of sculpturewould not splinter."

  • The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

  • I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

  • Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins....

  • Blue eyes wash off sometimes.

  • Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

  • If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.

  • Some women marry houses.

  • 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.

  • God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

  • The joy that isn't shared dies young.

  • this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.

  • stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.

  • Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.

  • The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.

  • Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.

  • 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.

  • And what of the dead? They lie without shoesin the stone boats. They are more like stonethan the sea would be if it stopped. They refuseto be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

  • The Witch's Life"When I was a childthere was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.All day she peered from her second storywindowfrom behind the wrinkled curtainsand sometimes she would open the windowand yell: Get out of my life!She had hair like kelpand a voice like a boulder.I think of her sometimes nowand wonder if I am becoming her.

  • Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.

  • We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

  • I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

  • I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse....

  • The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.

  • 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....

  • emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea...

  • 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.

  • I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...

  • Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

  • 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.

  • Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

  • 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.

  • I am younger each year at the first snow.

  • A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.

  • If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover....

  • O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.

  • When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.

  • I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

  • think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!

  • All who love have lied.

  • We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

  • 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....

  • 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.

  • Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

  • It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

  • God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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....

  • The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.

  • I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.

  • Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.

  • The Witch's LifeWhen I was a childthere was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.All day she peered from her second storywindowfrom behind the wrinkled curtainsand sometimes she would open the windowand yell: Get out of my life!She had hair like kelpand a voice like a boulder.I think of her sometimes nowand wonder if I am becoming her.

  • Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

  • It is snowing and death bugs meas stubborn as insomnia.

  • 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.

  • Watch out for intellect,because it knows so much it knows nothingand leaves you hanging upside down,mouthing knowledge as your heartfalls out of your mouth.

  • I am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

  • But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.

  • God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.

  • My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

  • Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?

  • 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.

  • And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.

  • O starry night, This is how I want to die

  • The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

  • Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!

  • Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady....

  • pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark....

  • Even without wars, life is dangerous.

  • Live or die, but don't poison everything.

  • As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

  • I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

  • The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.

  • I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.

  • Meanwhile in my head, IĆ¢??m undergoing open-heart surgery.

  • Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

  • 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....

  • I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

  • Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?

  • 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.

  • A woman who writes feels too much.

  • You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

  • Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

  • The sanest thing in this world is love.

  • Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

  • Somebody who should have been born is gone.

  • Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.

  • At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.

  • All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.

  • The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.

  • Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far ...

  • 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.

  • ...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

  • 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.

  • When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

  • As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

  • I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.

  • All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

  • I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.

  • The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

  • Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.

  • I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world....

  • One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share