Anne sexton quotes

Rats live on no evil star

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

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

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.

I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

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.

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

Poetry to me is prayer.

We are all writing God's poem.

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

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

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

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

Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.

this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.

To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.

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

Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?

My mouth blooms like a cut.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.

Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.

Mood can be as important as sense.

The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

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.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

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 ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

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

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

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.

Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.

Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

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.

Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.

As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

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.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.

I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.

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

My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.

A woman who writes feels too much.

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

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.

The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.

Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.

Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.

To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

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

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?

The sanest thing in this world is love.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.

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.

A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.

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

And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...

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.

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

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.

Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.

Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.

It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.

My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.

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

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

In a dream you are never eighty.

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.

I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?

Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.

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.

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

Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.

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

All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.

The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.

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.

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.

I am younger each year at the first snow.

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.

They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.

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

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

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

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.

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

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

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

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.

It would be pleasant to be drunk.

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

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.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

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

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.

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

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.