Anne Sexton citations

Page 3

“Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind”

“I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said… but did not.”

“Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.”

“I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware… Beware…”

“Out of used furniture she made a tree.”

“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.”

“Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen,
who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat,
who never lived and yet outlived her time,
hating men and dogs and Democrats.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”