Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Sexton - Page 2

It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.

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

A woman who writes feels too much.

I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.

I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere.

The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.

Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.

To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.

I am younger each year at the first snow.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.

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.

Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.

The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.

To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.

Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.

What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.

I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.

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.

Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.

I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.

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.

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.

Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.

Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.

I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.

Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?

I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.

The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face. in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.

The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.

Poetry to me is prayer.

Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

Mood can be as important as sense.

Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.

It would be pleasant to be drunk.

The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.