Anne Sexton Quotes

For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.

Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.

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.

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.

I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.

women are born twice.

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.

And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.

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.

Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have.

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

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.

the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.

Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.

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...

Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.

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.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.

There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.

Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

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

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.

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

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.

Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.

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

My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.

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.

The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.

it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it

Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?

I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.

You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.

the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.

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

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.

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

I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.