Anne Sexton Quotes

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed.

Even a small cough. Even a small love.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

O yellow eye,let me be sick with your heat,let me be feverish and frowning.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

sorrow is easier than guilt.

My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.

Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?

Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone.

Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.

Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?

Watch out for love (unless it is true, and every part of you says yes including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won't be heard and none of your running will run.

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.

Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.

Poetry to me is prayer.

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.

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

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)

As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate.

I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

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.

Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

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.

bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics.

Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.

Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas.

If they want to say something bad, they whisper.

There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.

It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.

Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.

I've grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by

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

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey.

I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.

I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

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.

Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.

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.

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.

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

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