Anne Sexton Quotes

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!

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.

I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.

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

Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.

I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?

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

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

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

I am younger each year at the first snow.

Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.

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

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

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

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

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

To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

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

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

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

Poetry to me is prayer.

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

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

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

Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Death's in the good-bye.

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

The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face. in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.

I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.

I've grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by

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 out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.

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.

Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside

Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.

Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.

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

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.