Anne Sexton Quotes

I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.

Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.

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.

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 ...

…madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet…

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

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

If someone burns out your eye
I will take your socket
and use it for an ashtray.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

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.

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

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.

Courage
It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.