Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Sexton

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Anne Sexton.

Last updated on November 4, 2024.

Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with depression, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom it was later alleged she physically and sexually assaulted.

American - Poet | November 9, 1928 - October 4, 1974

Source: Wikipedia

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

Anne Sexton

I want to be a child and not a mother, and I feel guilty about this.

Anne Sexton

Until I was twenty-eight, I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths.

Anne Sexton

My mother was top billing in our house.

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

These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.

Anne Sexton

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 nightmares out.

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.

Anne Sexton

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

Anne Sexton

Need is not quite belief.

Anne Sexton

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

Anne Sexton

Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.

Anne Sexton

I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.

Anne Sexton

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.

Anne Sexton

In a dream you are never eighty.

Anne Sexton

I said to my doctor at the beginning, 'I'm no good; I can't do anything. I'm dumb.' He suggested I try educating myself by listening to Boston's educational TV station. He said I had a perfectly good mind.

Anne Sexton

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Anne Sexton

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Anne Sexton

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

Anne Sexton

Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.

Anne Sexton

Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.

Anne Sexton

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

Anne Sexton

Death's in the good-bye.

Anne Sexton

Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice.

Anne Sexton

I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.

Anne Sexton

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

Anne Sexton

Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.

Anne Sexton

There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.

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

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

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

Anne Sexton

Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.

Anne Sexton

One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

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

Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.

Anne Sexton

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.

Anne Sexton

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

Anne Sexton

I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?

Anne Sexton

All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.

Anne Sexton

We are all writing God's poem.

Anne Sexton

I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.

Anne Sexton

I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.

Anne Sexton

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

Anne Sexton

The sanest thing in this world is love.

Anne Sexton

I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

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

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

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

Anne Sexton

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

Anne Sexton

I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.

Anne Sexton

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

Anne Sexton

My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.

Anne Sexton

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Anne Sexton

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

Anne Sexton

A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.

Anne Sexton