Anne Sexton Quotes

American poet (1928–1974)

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Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 - October 4, 1974), born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live or Die.

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Alternative Names: Anne Gray Harvey

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Earth, earth
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.

We all walk softly away.
We would stay and be the nurse but
there are too many of us and we are too worried to help.
It is love that walks away
and yet we have terrible mouths
and soft milk hands.
We worry with like.
We walk away like love.

Here in the hospital, I say,
that is not my body, not my body.
I am not here for the doctors
to read like a recipe.

Blue eyes wash off sometimes.

God is only mocked by believers.

I begin again, Dr.Y,
this neverland journal,
full of my own sense of filth.
Why else keep a journal, if not
to examine your own filth?

There is rust in my mouth,
the stain of an old kiss.

I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
I am pushing knives through the hands
that created two into one.
Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor.

What can I do with this memory?
Shake the bones out of it?
Defoliate the smile?
Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
Take the face of the man I love
and squeeze my foot into it,
when all the while my heart is making a museum?
I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.

I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.

The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.

My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.

In my sights I carve him
like a sculptor. I mold out
his last look at everyone.
I carry his eyes and his
brain bone at every position.
I know his male sex and I do
march over him with my index finger.
His mouth and his anus are one.
I am at the center of feeling.

With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.

Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.