Anne Sexton citations

Page 2

“the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate…”

“And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself”

“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.”

“Yet love enters my blood like an I. V.,
dripping in its little white moments.”

“God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”

“The soul was not cured,
it was as full as a clothes closet
of dresses that did not fit.”

“Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.”

“Now I am going back
And I have ripped my hand
From your hand as I said I would
And I have made it this far…”

“I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.”

“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.”

“I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.”

“Fee-fi-fo-fum -
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb.”

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”

“I burn the way money burns.”

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

“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”

“Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren”

“And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope”

“Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.”

“But I can't. Need is not quite belief.”

“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”

“When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.”

“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.”

“The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.”

“Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.”

“Give me your skin
as sheer as a cobweb,
let me open it up
and listen in and scoop out the dark.”

“You who have inhabited me
in the deepest and most broken place,
are going, going”

“Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.”