Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Sexton - Page 3

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.

When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.

I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.

Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.

Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.

Today life opened inside me like an egg.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.

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

Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.

Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.

The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

My mouth blooms like a cut.

I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.

All who love have lied.

And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.

No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.

Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.

Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.

Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren

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.

Rats live on no evil star

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.

Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.

Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.

Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.

All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.

Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.

I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.

Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.

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.

There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.

My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.

In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.

The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.

Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.

I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.

I've grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.