Anne Sexton Quotes

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

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

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.

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

I burn the way money burns.

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

There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.

Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?

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

The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.

Today life opened inside me like an egg.

All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.

Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.

Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.

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.

you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.

The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

I grow old on my bitterness.

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

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.

Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.

sorrow is easier than guilt.

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

I have been cut in two.

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

Love your self's self where it lives.

I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.

... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.

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.

All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!