Explore Quotes by Anne Sexton

In a dream you are never eighty.

Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.

The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

The sanest thing in this world is love.

Love your self's self where it lives.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

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.

If I could blame it on all the mothers and fathers of the world, they of the lessons, the pellets of power, they of the love surrounding you like batter ... Blame it on God perhaps? He of the first opening that pushed us all into our first mistakes? No, I'll blame it on Man For Man is God and man is eating the earth up like a candy bar and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean for it is known he will gulp it all down. The stars (possibly) are safe. At least for the moment. The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.

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

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?

I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

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 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.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

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.

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

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

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

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

The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.