Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Sexton - Page 4

At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.

My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

If I could blame it on all the mothers and fathers of the world, they of the lessons, the pellets of power, they of the love surrounding you like batter ... Blame it on God perhaps? He of the first opening that pushed us all into our first mistakes? No, I'll blame it on Man For Man is God and man is eating the earth up like a candy bar and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean for it is known he will gulp it all down. The stars (possibly) are safe. At least for the moment. The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.

Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.

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

O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.

Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.

God is only mocked by believers.

I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.

And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

Watch out for love (unless it is true, and every part of you says yes including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won't be heard and none of your running will run.

Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?

Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.

Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.

The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.

Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.

I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.

Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.

If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.

I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.

There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.

There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.

I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.

bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics. Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.

Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...

Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.

think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!

The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.

Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.

It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.

you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.

The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.

it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

I burn the way money burns.

Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.

Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.

unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.