Top 15 Anne Sexton Quotes

As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.

I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

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

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

Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

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.

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.

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.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Everyone in me is a bird
I am beating all my wings