Anne Sexton Quotes

209 Sourced Quotes

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

Anne Sexton
Even a notary would notarize our bed
as you knead me and I rise like bread.

Anne Sexton
Death sits with his key in my lock.
Not one day is taken for granted.

Anne Sexton
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?

Anne Sexton
Images are the heart of poetry... You're not a poet without imagery.

Anne Sexton
I'm lost. And it's my own fault. It's about time I figured out that I can't ask people to keep me found.

Anne Sexton
Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

Anne Sexton
Earth, earth
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.

Anne Sexton
You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.

Anne Sexton
In my sights I carve him
like a sculptor. I mold out
his last look at everyone.
I carry his eyes and his
brain bone at every position.
I know his male sex and I do
march over him with my index finger.
His mouth and his anus are one.
I am at the center of feeling.

Anne Sexton
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...

Anne Sexton
And my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

Anne Sexton
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

Anne Sexton
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

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
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!

Anne Sexton
I am teaching...It's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

Anne Sexton
Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

Anne Sexton
She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.

Anne Sexton
There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Anne Sexton
I cannot walk an inch
without trying to walk to God.

Anne Sexton
Think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!

Anne Sexton
Have you no beginning and end? Which heart is the real one? Which eye the seer? Why is it in the infinite plan that you would be severed and rise from the dead like a gargoyle with two heads?

Anne Sexton
We do not explain my husband's insane abuse
and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled
or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead.
Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.

Anne Sexton
The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Anne Sexton
Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have....

Anne Sexton
To die whole,
riddled with nothing
but desire for it,
is like breakfast
after love.

Anne Sexton
When I lie down to love,
old dwarf heart shakes her head.
Like an imbecile she was born old.

Anne Sexton
Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids.
Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying
and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust
and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.

Anne Sexton
You see, we live in a cold climate
and are not permitted to kiss on the street
so I made up a song that wasn't true.
I made up a song called Marriage.

Anne Sexton