Anne Sexton Quotes

American poet (1928–1974)

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Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 - October 4, 1974), born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live or Die.

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Alternative Names: Anne Gray Harvey

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Need is not quite belief.

There is rust in my mouth,
the stain of an old kiss.

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.

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

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

Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it’s all gone, the whole world falls apart.

Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

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.

I’d won the world
but like a
forsaken explorer,
I’d lost
my map.

"I like you; your eyes are full of language."

[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

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

Love! That red disease —

I do have that bad habit, so female, of taking people at their word.

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.

Tuesday

I have invented a lie.
There is no other day but Monday.
It seemed reasonable to pretend
that I could change the day
like a pair of socks.
To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren't much company.
If I were sick, I'd be a child,
tucked in under the woolens, sipping my broth.
As it is,
the days are not worth grabbing or lying about.
Nevertheless, you are the only one
that I can bother with this matter.

Monday

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.