Anne Sexton Quotations

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

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

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

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 immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.

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

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

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.

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

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

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

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.

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....

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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

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.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

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.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The sanest thing in this world is love.

A woman who writes feels too much.

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....

I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.

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.

To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.

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

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

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.

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

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

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

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

In a dream you are never eighty.

I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.

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.

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?

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

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.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

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.

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

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.

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 ...

Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.

Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?

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 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.

There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.

I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.

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.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

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.

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

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

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

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.

Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.

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

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.

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....

The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.

Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.

Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle....

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.

Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.

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.

Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.

Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.

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....

My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict....

life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

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.

I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere....

No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.

It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.

Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.

Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.