Anne Sexton Quotes

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.

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.

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

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

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

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

I am God, la de dah.

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

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

Fee-fi-fo-fum -
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb.

Some women marry houses.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

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

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

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

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon
of pain, that it drops downward
to the past where it mixes
with last year’s cupful
and downward into a decade’s quart
and downward into a lifetime’s ocean.
I alternate treading water
and deadman’s float.