Anne Sexton Quotes

And then I knew that the voice
of the spirits had been let in — as intense as an epileptic aura — and that no longer would I sing
alone.

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 open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

It doesn't matter who my father was, it matters who I remember he was.

إنني الممثلة الوحيدة.
يصعب على امرأة أن تمثّل مسرحية كاملة .
المسرحية هي حياتي، فصلي الوحيد ..
ركضي وراء الأيدي وعجزي عن اللحاق بها (الأيدي غير مرئية لأنها خارج الخشبة ..) ا
وكل ما أفعله على الخشبة هو الركض، مطاردة شيء ما دون أن أصل أبداً ...

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

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.

I am mad the way young girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering.

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

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.

I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.

Alone in our place I was a guest.

This one day her mother gave her
a basket of wine and cake
to take to her grandmother
because she was ill.
Wine and cake?
Where's the aspirin? The penicillin?
Where's the fruit juice?
Peter Rabbit got camomile tea.
But wine and cake it was.

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

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

I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.