Anne Sexton Quotes

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“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!”

“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.”

“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.”

“He puts his bones back on,
Turning the clock back an hour.
She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
the unbound limbs, the boards,
the roof, the removable roof.
She is his selection, part time.
You know the story too! Look,
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.”

“Catch me. I'm your disease.”

“I grow old on my bitterness.”

“To love another is something
like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.”

“Fact: death too is in the egg.
Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
And tomorrow the O. R. Only the summer was sweet.”

“We all walk softly away.
We would stay and be the nurse but
there are too many of us and we are too worried to help.
It is love that walks away
and yet we have terrible mouths
and soft milk hands.
We worry with like.
We walk away like love.”

“Here in the hospital, I say,
that is not my body, not my body.
I am not here for the doctors
to read like a recipe.”

“My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!”

“I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.”

“With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.”

“In my sights I carve him
like a sculptor. I mold out
his last look at everyone.
I carry his eyes and his
brain bone at every position.
I know his male sex and I do
march over him with my index finger.
His mouth and his anus are one.
I am at the center of feeling.”

“Blue eyes wash off sometimes.”

“I begin again, Dr. Y,
this neverland journal,
full of my own sense of filth.
Why else keep a journal, if not
to examine your own filth?”

“God is only mocked by believers.”

“In a dream you are never eighty.”

“We are all writing God's poem.”

“Love! That red disease”

“All who love have lied.”

“My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.”