Anne Sexton Quotes

"From "Her Kind"

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind."

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

ركوب المصعد باتجاه السماء
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كما قال الاطفائي:
لا تحجز غرفة في الطابق الخامس
في أي فندق في نيويورك.
إن فيها سلالم تصل إلى أعلى من ذلك
ولكن لن يتسلقها أحد.
كما قالت صحيفة نيويورك تايمز:
المصعد دائما يبحث
عن طابق الحريق
وينفتح آليا
ولن ينغلق.
ها هي التحذيرات
التي عليك أن تنساها
إن كنت تتسلق خارجا من ذاتك
إن كنت ستنطلق بقوة باتجاه السماء.

مرات عدة تجاوزتُ
الطابقَ الخامس
أتلوّى صاعدا
إلا إنني لم أصل إلى هناك
إلا مرة واحدة.
الطابق الستون:
نبتات صغيرة وبجعات
تنعطف متجهة إلى قبرها.
الطابق المائتان:
جبال صبرها صبر قطة،
صمت يرتدي حذاءه الخفيف.
الطابق الخمسمائة:
رسائلُ وخطابات عمرها قرون،
طيورٌ تشرب
مطبخٌ من سُحُب.
الطابقُ الستة آلاف:
النجومُ،
هياكلُ عظمية تشتعل فيها النيران،
أذرعُها تغني.
ومفتاح،
مفتاح كبير جدا،
يفتح شيئا –
في مكان ما –
هناك فوق.

Yet love enters my blood like an I.V.,
dripping in its little white moments.

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break

tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore. Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.

What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall

like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.

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

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

I am ugly,
submerged in my own past
and my own madness

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

I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.” Anne Sexton, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958)

Blue eyes wash off sometimes.

It is snowing and death bugs me
as stubborn as insomnia.

Personally I’d give ten thousand bucks to be a psychiatrist and not a writer.

Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.

Probably I am a fool…most poets are fools…but for some reason I love faith, but have none.