Anne Sexton Quotes

209 Sourced Quotes

There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.

Anne Sexton
Home is my Bethlehem,
my succoring shelter,
my mental hospital,
my wife, my dam,
my husband, my sir,
my womb, my skull.

Anne Sexton
The sky breaks.
It sags and breathes upon my face.
in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies
The world is full of enemies.
There is no safe place.

Anne Sexton
Take a woman talking,
purging herself with rhymes,
drumming words out like a typewriter,
planting words in you like grass seed.
You'll move off.

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

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

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
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
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
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
What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.

Anne Sexton
You must be a poet,
a lady of evil luck
desiring to be what you are not,
longing to be
what you can only visit.

Anne Sexton
His awful skin Stretched out by some tradesman is like my skin, here between my fingers, a kind of webbing, a kind of frog.

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

Anne Sexton
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.

Anne Sexton
If the doctors cure
then the sun sees it.
If the doctors kill
then the earth hides it.
The doctors should fear arrogance
more than cardiac arrest.

Anne Sexton