Anne Sexton: Likeness

Anne Sexton was poet from the United States. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Anne Sexton: 240 quotes35 likes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)