Anne Sexton - Heart Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.

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

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

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

Anne Sexton
With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.

Anne Sexton
It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

Anne Sexton
What can I do with this memory?
Shake the bones out of it?
Defoliate the smile?
Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
Take the face of the man I love
and squeeze my foot into it,
when all the while my heart is making a museum?
I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.

Anne Sexton
The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Anne Sexton