Anne Sexton Quotes

“I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.”

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”

“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”

“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children…. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”

“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.”

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

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”

“You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.”

“A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warm the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.”

“Love your self's self where it lives.
There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
why did I let you grow
in another place. You did not know my voice
when I came back to call. All the superlatives
of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe
will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am God, la de dah.”

“God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”

“I know that I have died before—once in November.”

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”

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

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

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

“I like you; your eyes are full of language."

[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964. ]”

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

“I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.”

“The joy that isn't shared dies young.”

“All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.”

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

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”

“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 bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”

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

“O starry night, This is how I want to die”

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

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

“the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate…”

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.”

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

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”

“I burn the way money burns.”

“But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.”

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

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

“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”

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

“But I can't. Need is not quite belief.”

“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

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

“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.”

“The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

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

“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…”