Anne Sexton Quotations | Page 3

Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.

Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.

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....

Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.

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.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

It would be pleasant to be drunk.

Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

Today life opened inside me like an egg ...

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

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

My mouth blooms like a cut.

If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.

My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.

There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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....

I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.

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.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

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....

Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made....

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.

we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.

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....

Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.

All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.

I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs....

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

In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

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

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 is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.

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

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.

No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.

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

So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict....

I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you....

Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.

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.

I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.

Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.

Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.

Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle....

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

The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.

Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand....

I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.

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

Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.

What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

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

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.

I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.

There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

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.

Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?

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

Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far ...

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

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

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

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

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 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.

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

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

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

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.

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?

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.

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

In a dream you are never eighty.

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

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

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

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

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 is June. I am tired of being brave.

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.

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.