Anne Sexton Quotes

209 Sourced Quotes

Take adultery or theft.
Merely sins.
It is evil who dines on the soul,
stretching out its long bone tongue.
It is evil who tweezers my heart,
picking out its atomic worms.

Anne Sexton
Yes, I know.
Death sits with his key in my lock.
Not one day is taken for granted.
Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.

Anne Sexton
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.

Anne Sexton
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal
toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost
ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust
would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.

Anne Sexton
Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.

Anne Sexton
True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

Anne Sexton
All considerations
for these human remains!
They must have an escort!
They are classified!

Anne Sexton
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.

Anne Sexton
I have forgiven all the old actors for dying.
A new one comes on with the same lines,
like large white growths, in his mouth.
The dancers come on from the wings,
perfectly mated.

Anne Sexton
My safe, safe psychosis is broken.
It was hard.
It was made of stone.
It covered my face like a mask.
But it has cracked.

Anne Sexton
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.

Anne Sexton
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.

Anne Sexton
Daisies in water are the longest lasting
flower you can give to someone.
Fact.
Buy daisies.
Not roses.

Anne Sexton
When the cow gives blood
and the Christ is born
we must all eat sacrifices.
We must all eat beautiful women.

Anne Sexton
Bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics.
Or form a Piss Club where we all go
in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.

Anne Sexton
This is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Anne Sexton
I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up....

Anne Sexton
I sit at my desk
each night with no place to go,
opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,
the whole U.S.,
its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

Anne Sexton
Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.

Anne Sexton
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice....

Anne Sexton
I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.

Anne Sexton
It is a dead heart.
It is inside of me.
It is a stranger
yet once it was agreeable,
opening and closing like a clam.

Anne Sexton
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.

Anne Sexton
I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

Anne Sexton
I brush my hair,
waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard,
for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart
and were screwed together. They will knit.
And the other corpse, the fractured heart,
I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

Anne Sexton
I am out of practice at living.
You are as brave as a motorcycle.

Anne Sexton
Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.

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

Anne Sexton
This is what poems are:
with mercy
for the greedy,
they are the tongue's wrangle,
the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Anne Sexton
Now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing....

Anne Sexton