Anne Sexton Quotes

She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.

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

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

My mouth blooms like a cut.

Mood can be as important as sense.

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

Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.

Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

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

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

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is; the waves fold over each other; they are in love with themselves; sleeping in their own skin; and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.

I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

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

As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

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

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

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.

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.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

A woman who writes feels too much.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

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

If I could blame it on all the mothers and fathers of the world, they of the lessons, the pellets of power, they of the love surrounding you like batter ... Blame it on God perhaps? He of the first opening that pushed us all into our first mistakes? No, I'll blame it on Man For Man is God and man is eating the earth up like a candy bar and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean for it is known he will gulp it all down. The stars (possibly) are safe. At least for the moment. The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

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

In a dream you are never eighty.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.

I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.

Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

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

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

I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.