Anne Sexton: Trending quotes (page 5)

“Some women marry houses.”

“She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear —
the fear of sleep.

Briar Rose
was an insomniac…
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence.”

“I rot on the wall, my own
Dorian Gray.”

“Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it’s all gone, the whole world falls apart.”

“Why have your eyes gone into their own room?”

“It would be pleasant to be drunk:
faithless to my tongue and hands,
giving up the boundaries
for the heroic gin.
Dead drunk is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
I will try it shortly.”

“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.”

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

“I was spread out daily
and examined for flaws.”

“The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.”

“Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”

“I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.”

“There is rust in my mouth,
the stain of an old kiss.”

“I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
I am pushing knives through the hands
that created two into one.
Our hands do not bleed at this,
they lie still in their dishonor.”

“Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.”

“Earth, earth
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.”

“What can I do with this memory?
Shake the bones out of it?
Defoliate the smile?
Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
Take the face of the man I love
and squeeze my foot into it,
when all the while my heart is making a museum?
I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.”

“I am alive when your fingers are.”

“I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own.”