Anne Sexton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anne Sexton on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Mood can be as important as sense.

I 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.

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

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

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

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are.

Take the brown eyes of my father,
those gun shots, those mean muds.
Bury them.
Take the blue eyes of my mother,
naked as the sea ...

God is only mocked by believers.

This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue's wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.

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

Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.

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

Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.

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

Today life opened inside me like an egg ...

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

Some women marry houses.

The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

Thumbs grow into my throat.
I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.

I planned to suffer
and I cannot.

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

I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.

The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.

Death, with one-eyed jack in his hand,
makes a promise to the thirteenth child.

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts or traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.

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

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

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

There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.

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

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

It's all a matter of history.
Brandy is no solace.
Librium only lies me down
like a dead snow queen.
Yes! I am still the criminal.

I rot on the wall, my own
Dorian Gray.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

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

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

No. Not really red,
but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

I leave you, home,
when I'm ripped from the doorstep
by commerce or fate. Then I submit
to the awful subway of the world ...

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

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.

Our bodies were trash.
We leave them on the shore.

Now he is gone
as you are gone.
But he belongs to me like lost baggage.

Hesitate in August.
Be shy.
Let your toes tremble in their sandals.
However, pick the grape
and eat with confidence.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry
and He said, Oh Lord,
send down a short-order cook.

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

Think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!

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

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.

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

I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.

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

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
Counting this row and that row of moccasins
Waiting on the silent shelf.

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.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

With this pen I take in hand my selves
and with these dead disciples I will grapple.
Though rain curses the window
let the poem be made.

It is not enough to read Hesse
and drink clam chowder,
we must have the answers.

What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.

My heart is on a budget.
It keeps me on the brink.

I've grown tired of love
You are the trouble with me
I watch you walk right by

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 sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it's all gone, the whole world falls apart.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

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

My mouth blooms like a cut.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.

Rocks crumble, make new forms,
oceans move the continents,
mountains rise up and down like ghosts
yet all is natural, all is change.

I have been cut in two.

How you choose to lose yourself matters. Trust me, it's all in the 'how'. It matters a lot.

I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.

A starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

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

We are all writing God's poem.

Sorrow is easier than guilt.

Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle ...

Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

The fish are naked.
The fish are always awake.
They are the color of old spoons
and caramels.

And then I knew that the voice
of the spirits had been let in
as intense as an epileptic aura
and that no longer would I sing
alone.

Women are born twice.

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

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

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

To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren't much company.

All who love have lied.

Everyone has left me
except my muse,
that good nurse.
She stays in my hand,
a mild white mouse.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards ...

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

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

Psychiatry is a dirty mirror ...

Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.

My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.

I am in my own mind.
I am locked in the wrong house.

If someone burns out your eye
I will take your socket
and use it for an ashtray.

My safe, safe psychosis is broken.
It was hard.
It was made of stone.
It covered my face like a mask.
But it has cracked.