Anne Sexton Quotes

Blue eyes wash off sometimes.

I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.

I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.

It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

My mouth blooms like a cut.

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.

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

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

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 tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?

God is only mocked by believers.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.

Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.

The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.

Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.

And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...

All who love have lied.

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.

When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.

Need is not quite belief.

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

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.

But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.

Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.

Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.

My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

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...

I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.

With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions