Anne Sexton Quotes

209 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Anne Sexton
I would sell my life to avoid
the pain that begins in the crib
with its bars or perhaps
with your first breath
when the planets drill
your future into you....

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
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
Unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag,
of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag.
Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan
useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.

Anne Sexton
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.

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

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

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

Anne Sexton
I put the gold star up in the front window
beside the flag. Alterations is what I know
and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.

Anne Sexton
I remember the stink of the liverwurst.
How I was put on a platter and laid
between the mayonnaise and the bacon.
The rhythm of the refrigerator
had been disturbed.

Anne Sexton
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.

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

Anne Sexton
Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky?
Was there a father?
Or have the planets cut holes in their nets
and let our childhood out,
or are we the dolls themselves,
born but never fed?

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

Anne Sexton
Nature is full of teeth
that come in one by one, then
decay,
fall out.

Anne Sexton
Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs,
whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle....

Anne Sexton
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

Anne Sexton