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Anne Sexton Quotes

Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.

✵ 9. November 1928 – 4. October 1974  •  Other names Anne Sextonová
Anne Sexton photo

Works

Live or Die
Live or Die
Anne Sexton
Live or Die
Live or Die
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: 120 quotes35 likes

Famous Anne Sexton Quotes

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

"The Poet's Story," January 1, 1972 entry
A Small Journal (1974)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Quotes about love

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Love Poems

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

Anne Sexton

Again and Again and Again"
Love Poems (1969)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"The Black Art"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"The Double Image"
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

Anne Sexton Quotes about God

“God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.”

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: The Awful Rowing Toward God

“I am God, la de dah.”

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

“God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton: Trending quotes

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

(For My Lover, Returning To His Wife)”

Anne Sexton

Source: Selected Poems

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

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

“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”

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Quotes

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

"For My Lover, Returning to His Wife"
Love Poems (1969)

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

Anne Sexton

"Killing the Love"
45 Mercy Street (1976)
Source: The Complete Poems

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

Anne Sexton

"Elegy in the Classroom"
Referring to Robert Lowell
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
Variant: Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Love Poems

“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.”

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

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

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

“Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”

Anne Sexton

Source: Complete Poems

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Love Poems

“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”

Anne Sexton

Source: To Bedlam and Part Way Back

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

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

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

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

Anne Sexton

“I burn the way money burns.”

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton book Live or Die

"Wanting to Die"
Live or Die (1966)

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

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

“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”

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"Letters to Dr. Y."
Words for Dr. Y (1978)

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

Anne Sexton

With Mercy for the Greedy
Variant: Need is not quite belief.
Source: All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Transformations

“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.”

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

“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”

Anne Sexton

Source: To Bedlam and Part Way Back

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: The Complete Poems

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

Anne Sexton

Source: To Bedlam and Part Way Back

“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…”

Anne Sexton

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