Explore Quotes by Anne Sexton

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

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

I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

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

Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.

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

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.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.

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.

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...