Anne Sexton Quotes

209 Sourced Quotes

I will be steel!
I will build a steel bridge over my need!
I will build a bomb shelter over my heart!
But my future is a secret.
It is as shy as a mole.

Anne Sexton
And within the house
ashes are being stuffed into my marriage,
fury is lapping the walls,
dishes crack on the shelves,
a strangler needs my throat,
the daughter has ceased to eat anything....

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

Anne Sexton
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....

Anne Sexton
I see myself as one would see another.
I have been cut in two.

Anne Sexton
And thus Snow White became the prince's bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.

Anne Sexton
Someone is dead.
Even the trees know it,
those poor old dancers who come on lewdly,
all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.

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

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

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

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

Anne Sexton
I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman's yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

Anne Sexton
Come, my pretender, my fritter,
my bubbler, my chicken biddy!
Oh succulent one,
it is but one turn in the road
and I would be a cannibal!

Anne Sexton
Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone.
Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.

Anne Sexton
Rocks crumble, make new forms,
oceans move the continents,
mountains rise up and down like ghosts
yet all is natural, all is change.

Anne Sexton
Then God spoke to me and said:
People say only good things about Christmas.
If they want to say something bad,
they whisper.

Anne Sexton
Stop the darkness and its amputations
and find the real McCoy
in the private holiness
of my hands.

Anne Sexton
Loving me with my shoes off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children
let out to play naked.

Anne Sexton
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

Anne Sexton
The stars are pears
that no one can reach,
even for a wedding.
Perhaps for a death.

Anne Sexton
If you meet a cross-eyed person
you must plunge into the grass,
alongside the chilly ants,
fish through the green fingernails
and come up with the four-leaf clover....

Anne Sexton
Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reigning them in like a circus hand....

Anne Sexton
All the oxygen of the world was in them.
All the feet of the babies of the world were in them.
All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them.
All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.

Anne Sexton
The heart,
this child of myself that resides in the flesh,
this ultimate signature of the me, the start
of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.

Anne Sexton
In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.

Anne Sexton
Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward... this baby that I bleed.

Anne Sexton
I raise my pelvis to God
so that it may know the truth of how
flowers smash through the long winter.

Anne Sexton