Anne Sexton Quotes

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

We make a stage set out of my past
and stuff painted puppets into it.
We make a bridge toward my future
and I cry to you: I will be steel!
I will build a steel bridge over my need!
I will build a bomb shelter over my heart!
But my future is a secret.
It is as shy as a mole.

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

I want to calm down, to rest, to outlive this nonsense.

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.

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

The butterfly owns her now.
It covers her and her wounds.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.

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.

"Please, when I come home, don't forget the "soul"... and I don't mean "sweet sayings"... I mean the truth, the sharing of our inmost thoughts, good or bad... lost or comforting. That is the soul. I think it. The soul, is I think, a human being who speaks with the pressure of death at his head. That's how I'd phrase it. The self in trouble... not just the self without love (as us) but the self as it will always be (with gun at its head finally)... To live and know it is only for a moment... that is to know "the soul"... and it increases closeness and despair and happiness..."

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

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.

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

Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.