Anne Sexton > Quotes

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton

“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.”
― Anne Sexton

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
― Anne Sexton

“As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”
― Anne Sexton

“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”
― Anne Sexton

“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

“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.”
― Anne Sexton

“Live or die. But don't poison everything.”
― Anne Sexton

“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.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“I am God, la de dah.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”
― Anne Sexton

“Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.”
― Anne Sexton

“The joy that isn't shared dies young.”
― Anne Sexton

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton

“Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”
― Anne Sexton, Complete Poems

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

“All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it. ”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.”
― Anne Sexton, To Bedlam And Part Way Back

“Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.”
― Anne Sexton

“O starry night, This is how I want to die”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”
― Anne Sexton

“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”
― Anne Sexton

“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

“Yet love enters my blood like an I.V.,
dripping in its little white moments.”
― Anne Sexton

“Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

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

“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”
― Anne Sexton

“I burn the way money burns.”
― Anne Sexton

“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.”
― Anne Sexton

“Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
― Anne Sexton

“The soul was not cured,
it was as full as a clothes closet
of dresses that did not fit.”
― Anne Sexton

“the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate…”
― Anne Sexton

“But I can't. Need is not quite belief.”
― Anne Sexton

“Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.”
― Anne Sexton

“The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives”
― Anne Sexton

“And 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 Sexton

“Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

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.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.”
― Anne Sexton

“Rats live on no evil star”
― Anne Sexton

“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.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break

tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore. Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.

What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall

like floods of life in frost.
And 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,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.”
― Anne Sexton, To Bedlam And Part Way Back

“Fee-fi-fo-fum -
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb.”
― Anne Sexton

“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”
― Anne Sexton

“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.”
― Anne Sexton

“being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions”
― Anne Sexton

“Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.”
― Anne Sexton, Love Poems

“Now 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 Sexton

“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.”
― Anne Sexton