Anne Sexton Quotes

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

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

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

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

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

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.

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.

Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.

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.

O starry night, This is how I want to die

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

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.

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

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

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.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.

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.

Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.

But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.

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.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

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

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!

We are all writing God's poem.

Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.

I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere.

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

Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

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.

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.

I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.

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

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.

The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.

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.

The sanest thing in this world is love.

There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.

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

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.

Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.

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.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.

One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.

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.

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!