Anne Sexton: Trending quotes

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Anne Sexton: 240 quotes59 likes

“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”

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.”

Source: The Complete Poems

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

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…”

“Out of used furniture she made a tree.”

Source: The Complete Poems

“And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”

"The Truth the Dead Know"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“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.”

Source: The Complete Poems

“The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts or traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.”

Source: All My Pretty Ones

“Rats live on no evil star”

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

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.”

“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.”

“How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?”

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?”

Source: The Awful Rowing Toward God

“Quite collected at cocktail parties,
meanwhile in my head
I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”

Variant: Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
Source: Transformations

“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.”

Source: The Awful Rowing Toward God

“If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.”

“being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions”

“The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.”