Anne Sexton Quotes

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

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

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

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

And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...

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.

Today life opened inside me like an egg.

I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.

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.

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

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.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

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

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

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

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.

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

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.

Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.

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

It would be pleasant to be drunk.

But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.

women are born twice.

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.

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Rats live on no evil star

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

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

In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.

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

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

I burn the way money burns.

I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

... 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.

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

Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

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

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 rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

Love your self's self where it lives.

O starry night, This is how I want to die

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.

Even without wars, life is dangerous.