"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

"As it has been said
Love and a cough cannot be concealed
Even a small cough
Even a small love"
— Anne Sexton

"As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off."
— 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)

"I am God, la de dah."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."
— Anne Sexton

"Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance."
— 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

"The joy that isn't shared dies young."
— Anne Sexton

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

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

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

"I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face."
— 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: Anne Sexton)

"Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems)

"God owns heaven but He craves the earth." "
— Anne Sexton

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

"I burn the way money burns."
— Anne Sexton

"O starry night, This is how I want to die"
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: 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

"Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren"
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it. "
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"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)

"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

""Rats live on no evil star""
— Anne Sexton

"Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"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)

"Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
— Anne Sexton

""Put you ear down close to your soul and listen hard..." --Anne Sexton"
— 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: 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