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Anne Sexton Quotes

Anne Sexton quote from classy quote

Watch out for intellect,because it knows so much it knows nothingand leaves you hanging upside down,mouthing knowledge as your heartfalls out of your mouth.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Intellect Love Poetry

Do you like me?”No answer.Silence bounced, fell off his tongueand sat between usand 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.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Heartbreak Love Rejection

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Death Life Poison

Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Death Suicide

Wanting to Die Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.Then the almost unnameable lust returns.Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention,the furniture you have placed under the sun.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.In this way, heavy and thoughtful,warmer than oil or water,I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.I did not think of my body at needle point.Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.Suicides have already betrayed the body.Still-born, they don't always die,but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweetthat even children would look on and smile.To thrust all that life under your tongue!—that, all by itself, becomes a passion.Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,and yet she waits for me, year after year,to so delicately undo an old wound,to empty my breath from its bad prison.Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,leaving the page of the book carelessly open,something unsaid, the phone off the hookand the love, whatever it was, an infection.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Death Suicide

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Lies Poetry Promises

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Exuberance Moderation Poetry

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Books Friends Poetry

I am God, la de dah.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Confessional Poetry Poetry

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Poetry The Addict

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting,one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child,one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Poetry

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.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Poetry Writing

Some women marry houses.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton Housewife Marriage Matrimony Poetry Relationships Women

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton Madness Poetry

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.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Contemplation Feeling Nature Poetry Words

I am, to be sure, afraid that if you knew me that you wouldn’t love me. But this must be faced…I fear it in any relationship. Thus I am perhaps afraid to reveal facts about things…or to say too much for fear if I make too much noise you’ll drift away, pull down the shade of your ivory tower…and after that. Afraid, I guess, that I’ll loose you…I keep losing people.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Fear Life Loss Love Relationships

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Living Soul

The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Book Shelves Books Reading

I’d won the worldbut like aforsaken explorer,I’d lostmy map.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton Explorer Losing Loss Map World

Taking into consideration all your lovelinesswhy can't you burn your bootsoles and yourdraft card? How can you sit there saying yesto war? You'll be a pauper when you die, soreboy. Dead, while I still live at our addresss.Oh my brother, why do you keep making planswhen I am at seizures of hearts and hands?Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ille de France, the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa's London Harness case he took abroad and kept i our attic laced with old leather straps for storage and hisscholar's robes, black licorice - that metamorphosiswith it's crimson blood. The Papa and Mama Dance

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Life Pacifism Sex War

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton Fairytale Hold Me Poetry Rapunzel Strength Strong

exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Depression Loneliness

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.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Depression

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Depression Loneliness

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.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Depression

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Darkness Fairy Tales Love Romance

No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Annesexton Lit Poem Poetry Writing

It is snowing and death bugs meas stubborn as insomnia.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anne Insomnia Oh Poem Sexton Winter

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Expression Expressiveness Eyes Language

Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Expression Expressiveness Eyes Language

Quite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headI'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anxiety Parties

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Memoir Memoir Writing Writing Writing Life Writing Process Creative

Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Addiction Suicidal Ideation

Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That's another kind of prison.It's not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon melike some sleeping jellyfish.What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help -this life after death?

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Fairy Tales Retold Incest Molestation Rape Sleeping Beauty

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

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Pictures Soul Wish

Love your self's self where it lives.

~ Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Self Acceptance
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