Anne Sexton Quotes

"The Fury of Sunsets"

Something
cold is in the air,
an aura of ice
and phlegm.
All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
The horizon bleeds
and sucks its thumb.
The little red thumb
goes out of sight.
And I wonder about
this lifetime with myself,
this dream I'm living.
I could eat the sky
like an apple
but I'd rather
ask the first star:
why am I here?
why do I live in this house?
who's responsible?
eh?

I feel myself beginning to love you instead of just need you. I don’t think I have ever loved anyone in my life, not really – just needed them, wanted them to love me to possess me – to become such a part of someone I could lose my frightened self…

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

It was built on air and ghosts…it was truly beautiful but it died…because it tried to get real and it was never real.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

Sun, you hammer of yellow,
you hat on fire,
you honeysuckle mama,
pour your blonde on me!
Let me laugh for an entire hour
at your supreme being, your Cadillac stuff,
because I've come a long way
from Brussels sprouts.

Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
They said you were immeasurably empty
bu you are not.
They said you were sick unto dying
but they were wrong.
You are winging like a school girl.
You are not torn.

Again And Again And Again

You said the anger would come back

just as the love did.

I have a black look I do not

like. It is a mask I try on.

I migrate toward it and its frog

sits on my lips and defecates.

It is old. It is also a pauper.

I have tried to keep it on a diet.

I give it no unction.

There is a good look that I wear

like a blood clot. I have

sewn it over my left breast.

I have made a vocation of it.

Lust has taken plant in it

and I have placed you and your

child at its milk tip.

Oh the blackness is murderous

and the milk tip is brimming

and each machine is working

and I will kiss you when

I cut up one dozen new men

and you will die somewhat,

again and again.

The Truth the Dead Know

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Anne Sexton was a model who became a confessional poet, writing about intimate aspects of her life, after her doctor suggested that she take up poetry as a form of therapy. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath was one of her classmates. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, but later committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. Topics she covered in her poems included adultery, masturbation, menstruation, abortion, despair and suicide.

My bones are loose as clothespins,
as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop
and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins
revved up like an engine that would not stop.

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.

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

I am so tired of that old suffering.

They could not listen.
They could not stop.
What they did was the death dance.
What they did would do them in.

To love another is something
like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.