Anne Sexton Quotes

Became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.

Now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing ...

In an old time
there was a king as wise as a dictionary.

God has a brown voice, soft and full as beer.

For all you who are going,
and there are many who are climbing their pain,
many who will be painted out with a black ink
suddenly and before it is time,
for these many I say,
awkwardly, clumsily,
take off your life like trousers,
your shoes, your underwear,
then take off your flesh,
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God.

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.

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died.

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.

Annie, Annie you sang
and I knew you drove a pure gold car
and put diamonds in you coke
for the crunchy sound, the adorable sound
and the moon too was in your portfolio,

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear
the fear of sleep.
Briar Rose
was an insomniac ...
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince's presence.

Being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul?

Keeping The City

"Unless the Lord keepeth the city, the watchman guardeth in vain" - John F. Kennedy's unspoken words in Dallas on November 23, 1963.

Once,
in August,
head on your chest,
I heard wings
battering up the place,
something inside trying to fly out
and I was silent
and attentive,
the watchman.
I was your small public,
your small audience
but it was you that was clapping,
it was you untying the snarls and knots,
the webs, all bloody and gluey;
you with your twelve tongues and twelve wings
beating, wresting, beating, beating
your way out of childhood,
that airless net that fastened you down.

Since then I was more silent
though you had gone miles away,
tearing down, rebuilding the fortress.
I was there
but could do nothing
but guard the city
lest it break.

I was silent.
I had a strange idea I could overhear
but that your voice, tongue, wing
belonged solely to you.
The Lord was silent too.
I did not know if he could keep you whole,
where I, miles away, yet head on your chest,
could do nothing. Not a single thing.

The wings of the watchman,
if I spoke, would hurt the bird of your soul
as he nested, bit, sucked, flapped.
I wanted him to fly, burst like a missile from your throat,
burst from the spidery-mother-web,
burst from Woman herself
w

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.

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

You fell, she said, just remember you fell.
I fell, is all he told the doctors
in the big hospital. A nice lady came
and asked him questions but because
he didn't want to be sent away he said, I fell.
He never said anything else although he could talk fine.

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

During the rainstorms of April the oyster rises from the sea and opens its shell - rain enters it - when it sinks the raindrops become the pearl. So take a picnic,
open your body, and give birth to pearls. ⠀

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside

The soul was not cured,
it was as full as a clothes closet
of dresses that did not fit.

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

I tell it stories now and then
and feed it images like honey.
I will not speculate today
with poems that think they're money.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

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

It would be pleasant to be drunk.

Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women"

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was -
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

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

There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.

Nature is full of teeth
that come in one by one, then
decay,
fall out.

This is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have ...

Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen ...

Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ("You, Doctor Martin")

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

Think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!

Come, my pretender, my fritter,
my bubbler, my chicken biddy!
Oh succulent one,
it is but one turn in the road
and I would be a cannibal!

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.

Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or a foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.

My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.

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.

I would like to think that no one would die anymore
if we all believed in daisies
but the worms know better, don't they?
They slide into the ear of a corpse
and listen to his great sigh.

Alone in our place I was a guest.

Man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

My ideas are a curse.
They spring from a radical discontent
with the awful order of things.
I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse.
I play witch.

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are.

Oh, all right, I say,
I'll save myself.

My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.

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.

I burn the way money burns.

Funnel

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost-new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died. The children honored their
separate arts; two became moderately famous,
three married and fattened their delicate share
of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was
a concert pianist. She had a notable career
and wore cropped hair and walked like a man,
or so I heard when prying a childhood car
into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan.
One died a pinafore child, she stays her five
years forever. And here is one that wrote-
I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive
words and scratch out my short marginal notes
and finger my accounts.
back from that great-grandfather I have come
to tidy a country graveyard for his sake,
to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun
and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake.
I like best to think of that Bunyan man
slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale
for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan
of culture to do it big. On this same scale
he built seven arking houses and they still stand.
One, five stories up, straight up like a square
box, still dominates its coastal edge of land.
It is rented cheap in the summer musted air
to sneaker-footed families who pad through
its ro

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

Our bodies were trash.
We leave them on the shore.

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

Loving me with my shoes off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children
let out to play naked.

I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze
and so do you.
Not out of disrespect.
Out of pique.
Out of a man-to-man thing.

I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.

Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse.

It's all a matter of history.
Brandy is no solace.
Librium only lies me down
like a dead snow queen.
Yes! I am still the criminal.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

I love the word warm.
It is almost unbearable
so moist and breathlike.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life
he is so busy recreating it.

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.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
Counting this row and that row of moccasins
Waiting on the silent shelf.

The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring,
pulling off the elopement wedding ring,
and holding them, clicking them
in thumb and forefinger,
the indent of twenty-five years,
like a tiny rip leaving its mark ...

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

Jewels! Today each twig is important,
each ring, each infection, each form
is all that the gods must have meant.

The Saints come,
as human as a mouth,
with a bag of God in their backs,
like a hunchback,
they come,
they come marching in.

I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.

Poets are sitting in my kitchen.
Why do these poets lie?
Why do children get children and
Did you hear what it said?

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.

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 is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.

Life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

At night the bats will beat on the trees, knowing it all, seeing what they sensed all day....

After Auschwitz"

Anger,
as black as a hook,
overtakes me.
Each day,
each Nazi
took, at 8: 00 A.M., a baby
and sauteed him for breakfast
in his frying pan.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and picks at the dirt under his fingernail.

Man is evil,
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
that should be burnt,
I say aloud.
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.

Man with his small pink toes,
with his miraculous fingers
is not a temple
but an outhouse,
I say aloud.
Let man never again raise his teacup.
Let man never again write a book.
Let man never again put on his shoe.
Let man never again raise his eyes,
on a soft July night.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
I say those things aloud.

I beg the Lord not to hear.

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There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.
(Rumpelstiltskin)

Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.

I was
the girl of the chain letter,
the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,
the one of the telephone bills,
the wrinkled photo and the lost connections ...

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you - you go ahead,
go on, go back down,
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.

Now I am going back
And I have ripped my hand
From your hand as I said I would
And I have made it this far ...

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

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 sweet
that 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

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry
and He said, Oh Lord,
send down a short-order cook.

It is not enough to read Hesse
and drink clam chowder,
we must have the answers.

All in all, I'd say,
the world is strangling.
And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes
converse about it.
And the moon,
under its dark hood,
falls out of the sky each night,
with its hungry red mouth
to suck at my scars.

Need is not quite belief.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.

Some ghosts are women.
Not angels, but ghosts.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

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 ...

Stop the darkness and its amputations
and find the real McCoy
in the private holiness
of my hands.

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.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.