1.
Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
Anne Sexton
2.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Anne Sexton
3.
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
Anne Sexton
4.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
5.
As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
Anne Sexton
6.
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
7.
Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
Anne Sexton
8.
Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
Anne Sexton
9.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Anne Sexton
10.
O starry night, This is how I want to die
Anne Sexton
11.
O yellow eye,
let me be sick with your heat,
let me be feverish and frowning.
Anne Sexton
12.
I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
Anne Sexton
13.
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
14.
I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
Anne Sexton
15.
All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
16.
The joy that isn't shared dies young.
Anne Sexton
17.
The fish are naked.
The fish are always awake.
They are the color of old spoons
and caramels.
Anne Sexton
18.
I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving;
then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.
Anne Sexton
19.
Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
Anne Sexton
20.
But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.
Anne Sexton
21.
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
22.
Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
Anne Sexton
23.
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
24.
...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.
Anne Sexton
25.
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
26.
We are all writing God's poem.
Anne Sexton
27.
Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.
Anne Sexton
28.
I would like to bury
all the hating eyes
under the sand somewhere.
Anne Sexton
29.
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
30.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
Anne Sexton
31.
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
Anne Sexton
32.
I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
Anne Sexton
33.
Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
Anne Sexton
34.
I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton
35.
The stars are pears
that no one can reach,
even for a wedding.
Perhaps for a death.
Anne Sexton
36.
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
37.
The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.
Anne Sexton
38.
I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
Anne Sexton
39.
The sanest thing in this world is love.
Anne Sexton
40.
There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.
Anne Sexton
41.
Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
Anne Sexton
42.
Frog has no nerves.
Frog is as old as a cockroach.
Frog is my father's genitals.
Frog is a malformed doorknob.
Frog is a soft bag of green.
Anne Sexton
43.
Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
44.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Anne Sexton
45.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Anne Sexton
46.
I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
47.
One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
48.
I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
Anne Sexton
49.
I was
the girl of the chain letter,
the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,
the one of the telephone bills,
the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.
Anne Sexton
50.
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