Anne Sexton Quotes
My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
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.
Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
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.
My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
Watch out for love (unless it is true, and every part of you says yes including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won't be heard and none of your running will run.
Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.
O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.
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.
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.
After a disaster strikes, it can be very devastating and very challenging. You're going to need a lot of strength and energy, and the American Red Cross suggests you go for the high protein items.
I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.
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.
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.
I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.
Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.
Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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.