Anne Sexton Quotes - Page 4

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Before I was married, I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baking a potato.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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 Sexton / Poet

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

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