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Anne Sexton Quotes
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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
Anne Sexton: 120 quotes59 likes

Anne Sexton Quotes

“Out of used furniture she made a tree.”

Anne Sexton

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.”

Anne Sexton

"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.”

Anne Sexton

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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: All My Pretty Ones

“Rats live on no evil star”

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

“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?”

Anne Sexton

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?”

Anne Sexton

Source: The Awful Rowing Toward God

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

Anne Sexton

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

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

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

Anne Sexton

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Some women marry houses.”

Anne Sexton

“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.”

Anne Sexton

Source: Transformations

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

Anne Sexton

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

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

Anne Sexton book Live or Die

"Your Face on the Dog's Neck"
Live or Die (1966)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"Letter Written During a January Northeaster"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

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

Anne Sexton book Live or Die

"Those Times..."
Live or Die (1966)

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

Anne Sexton

"The Dead Heart"
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)

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

Anne Sexton

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"
Transformations (1971)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"Her Kind"
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

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

Anne Sexton

"The Lost Lie" from The Divorce Papers
45 Mercy Street (1976)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"Killing the Love" from The Divorce Papers
45 Mercy Street (1976)

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

Anne Sexton

"Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"As It Was Written" from Last Poems
Poems 1971-1973 (1981)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"Waking Alone" from The Divorce Papers
45 Mercy Street (1976)

“I am alive when your fingers are.”

Anne Sexton

"The Breast"
Love Poems (1969)

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

Anne Sexton

"The Division of Parts"
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"You All Know the Story of the Other Woman"
Love Poems (1969)

“Catch me. I'm your disease.”

Anne Sexton

"Eighteen Days Without You": December 18th
Love Poems (1969)

“I grow old on my bitterness.”

Anne Sexton book Live or Die

"Two Sons"
Live or Die (1966)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"Admonitions to a Special Person" (1974) from Last Poems frameless QOTD 2007·11·09 Sound file
Poems 1971-1973 (1981)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"The Operation"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"To Like, To Love"
Poems 1971-1973 (1981)

“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.”

Anne Sexton

"August 17th" from Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die: The Horoscope Poems
Words for Dr. Y (1978)

“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!”

Anne Sexton

"The Kiss"
Love Poems (1969)

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

Anne Sexton

"Frenzy"
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)

“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.”

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"The Wifebeater"
The Book of Folly (1972)

“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.”

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"The Assassin"
The Book of Folly (1972)

“Blue eyes wash off sometimes.”

Anne Sexton

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

“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?”

Anne Sexton

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

“God is only mocked by believers.”

Anne Sexton

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

“In a dream you are never eighty.”

Anne Sexton

"Old"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

“We are all writing God's poem.”

Anne Sexton

As quoted by Erica Jong, in "Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000) http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/oct/26/features11.g2

“Love! That red disease”

Anne Sexton book Live or Die

"Menstruation at Forty"
Live or Die (1966)

“All who love have lied.”

Anne Sexton

"The Operation"
All My Pretty Ones (1962)

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

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"Killing the Spring"
The Book of Folly (1972)