Transformations Quotes

“And I. I too.
Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Give me your skin
as sheer as a cobweb,
let me open it up
and listen in and scoop out the dark.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear —
the fear of sleep.

Briar Rose
was an insomniac...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“If someone burns out your eye
I will take your socket
and use it for an ashtray.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.

(Rumpelstiltskin)”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I am.
Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help -
this life after death?”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“I suffer for birds and fireflies
but not frogs, she said,
and threw him across the room.
Kaboom!
Like a genie out of a samovar,
a handsome prince arose in the
corner of the bedroom.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“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.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“This one day her mother gave her
a basket of wine and cake
to take to her grandmother
because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin? The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got camomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“It is not enough to read Hesse
and drink clam chowder,
we must have the answers.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Death, with one-eyed jack in his hand,
makes a promise to the thirteenth child.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“the drunken poet (a genuis by daylight)”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“I grew,
and then there were many strange apparitions,
the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison
and all of that.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“It was ordained.
Just as the fates deal out
the plague with a tarot card.
Just as the Supreme Being drills
holes in our skulls to let
the Boston Symphony through.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Further, I must not dream
for when I do I see the table set
and a faltering crone at my place,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes
as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Even in the pink crib
the somehow deficient,
the somehow maimed,
are thought to have
a special pipeline to the mystical,
the faint smell of the occult,
a large ear on the God-horn.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“and only as she dreamt of the yellow hair
did moonlight sift into her mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations