Top 346 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Sexton - Page 6

I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.

All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.

I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.

My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.

Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.

There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.

It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.

My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.

I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.

Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?

Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.

I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.

Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.

I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.

If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.

My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.

With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.

Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.

In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.

I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.

Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.

the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.

the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.

Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins.

And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.

Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.

I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.

O starry night, This is how I want to die

When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.

Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?

Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle.

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside

Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have.

Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.

Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.

I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.

Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.

You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.

Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!

I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.