My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
Anne SextonIt's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
Anne SextonDepression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
Anne SextonLetters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.
Anne SextonThe beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Anne SextonI think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Anne SextonI am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?
Anne SextonGive me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne SextonThere once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)
Anne SextonTalk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
Anne SextonSuicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Anne SextonI think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne SextonAnd 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.
Anne SextonThey [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
Anne SextonI am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
Anne SextonAnd 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
Anne SextonNow 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.
Anne SextonWell, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne SextonMaybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
Anne SextonI'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
Anne SextonThief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.
Anne SextonGod went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
Anne Sexton