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Anne Sexton
44 quotes
“We are all writing God's poem.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Erica Jong, in "Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000)
“Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love your self's self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to; or if there is, why did I let you grow in another place. You did not know my voice when I came back to call. All the superlatives of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I imitate a memory of belief that I do not own.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All who love have lied.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Need is not quite belief.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warm the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be pleasant to be drunk: faithless to my tongue and hands, giving up the boundaries for the heroic gin. Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool. I will try it shortly.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a dream you are never eighty.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was spread out daily and examined for flaws.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grow old on my bitterness.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love! That red disease —”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why have your eyes gone into their own room?”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My mouth blooms like a cut. I've been wronged all year, tedious nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby crybaby, you fool!”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am alive when your fingers are.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You said the anger would come back just as the love did.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He puts his bones back on, Turning the clock back an hour. She knows flesh, that skin balloon, the unbound limbs, the boards, the roof, the removable roof. She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, when it is over he places her, like a phone, back on the hook.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Catch me. I'm your disease.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With a tongue like a razor he will kiss the mother, the child, and we three will color the stars black in memory of his mother who kept him chained to the food tree or turned him on and off like a water faucet and made women through all these hazy years the enemy with a heart of lies.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In my sights I carve him like a sculptor. I mold out his last look at everyone. I carry his eyes and his brain bone at every position. I know his male sex and I do march over him with my index finger. His mouth and his anus are one. I am at the center of feeling.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Poet's Story," January 1, 1972 entry
“The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can I do with this memory? Shake the bones out of it? Defoliate the smile? Stub out the chin with cigarettes? Take the face of the man I love and squeeze my foot into it, when all the while my heart is making a museum? I love you the way the oboe plays. I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel. I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes. Yet I fear you, as one in the desert fears the sun.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss. I am pushing knives through the hands that created two into one. Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is rust in my mouth, the stain of an old kiss.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death, I need my little addiction to you. need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I begin again, Dr.Y, this neverland journal, full of my own sense of filth. Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God is only mocked by believers.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blue eyes wash off sometimes.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here in the hospital, I say, that is not my body, not my body. I am not here for the doctors to read like a recipe.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all walk softly away. We would stay and be the nurse but there are too many of us and we are too worried to help. It is love that walks away and yet we have terrible mouths and soft milk hands. We worry with like. We walk away like love.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Earth, earth riding your merry-go-round toward extinction, right to the roots thickening the oceans like gravy, festering in your caves, you are becoming a latrine.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To love another is something like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.”
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Admonitions to a Special Person" (1974) from Last Poems 11px|frameless QOTD 2007·11·09 Sound file