Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Sexton - Page 5

Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

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.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.

sorrow is easier than guilt.

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.

... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is; the waves fold over each other; they are in love with themselves; sleeping in their own skin; and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.

I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.

Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.

The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.

Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.

Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.

I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

I have been cut in two.

I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.

The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.

I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.

Blue eyes wash off sometimes.

Love your self's self where it lives.

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.

So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.

life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!

Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

I grow old on my bitterness.

Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

After a disaster strikes, it can be very devastating and very challenging. You're going to need a lot of strength and energy, and the American Red Cross suggests you go for the high protein items.

women are born twice.

Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.