Searching for Mercy Street Quotes

“Why, in fact, is the word pain rarely used when describing depression? The dictionary uses synonyms such as melancholy, despondency, and sadness.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“Because I found out that a little love is better than no love at all.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“Depression is boring, I think,
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave. —ANNE SEXTON, “THE FURY OF RAIN STORMS”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“I have discovered that love and empathy play side by side with anger, fear, and resentment.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“this single memory, coupled with the others of Mother masturbating on me early in the mornings, or in front of me when I was small, was ample.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“No daughter would ever want to know these intimate details about her mother’s life.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“She had told Dr. Orne that Plath “took something that was mine—that death was mine!”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“Every month I watched my father scrape to pay his bills, sending Mother a monthly child-support check from which neither Joy nor I ever saw a dime.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“I did not want to be recognized as “Anne Sexton’s daughter,” and I was running from that label as hard as I could.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“One afternoon Mother called to tell me she expected me to testify against my father: “I need you to say that you witnessed him beating me up, that I was afraid for my life.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“A poem wasn’t really a poem, it seemed to her, unless it was full of metaphor; it took her a while to adjust to the prosody she heard in his work.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“except that a fugue was marked by lassitude while a trance could sometimes be accompanied by activity, such as masturbating or talking.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“I discovered a new emotion, bubbling up from underneath my fear: anger. I was getting very tired of it all. Very tired.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“writing is magic because it harnesses the energy generated by the chaos within.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“Maybe why I want Kayo to beat me up is to prove he’s a man and I’m a woman,” she mused to Dr. Orne. “I want him to be aggressive.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“More often, a poem went through twenty or thirty drafts with amazing numbers of alterations”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“The speed with which Anne Sexton found acceptance within the cadre of the literary elite was indeed remarkable, but it belied the work required.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me ...
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It’s a small thing
to rage inside your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“Mommy?” I plead. “Please?” “No,” she pouts. “I’m nine!” “Please,” I say and start to sob, my chest heaving its burden up and down. “I’m nine!” “Please be thirty-four!”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“How much am I willing to endure in order to remember? Do I truly want to be empowered by memory or language?”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“No one will rescue you.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“At three I had learned the litany of despair and knew its truth with all my being: depend on no one.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“It hurt to be so alone. It hurt to be forgotten.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“My mother spent all of her life seeking the metaphorical home she called “Mercy Street.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“To speak candidly, with neither justification nor humiliation, relieves the haunting of memory and mind and becomes one way to regain our dignity and our strength.”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

“how do we learn to accept and forgive those who have both succeeded and failed in helping us become who we are?”
― Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton