Anne Sexton Quotes

I’d won the world
but like a
forsaken explorer,
I’d lost
my map.

Tuesday

I have invented a lie.
There is no other day but Monday.
It seemed reasonable to pretend
that I could change the day
like a pair of socks.
To tell the truth
days are all the same size
and words aren't much company.
If I were sick, I'd be a child,
tucked in under the woolens, sipping my broth.
As it is,
the days are not worth grabbing or lying about.
Nevertheless, you are the only one
that I can bother with this matter.

Monday

It would be pleasant to be drunk:
faithless to my tongue and hands,
giving up the boundaries
for the heroic gin.
Dead drunk
is the term I think of,
insensible,
neither cool nor warm,
without a head or foot.
To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
I will try it shortly.

Hesitate in August.
Be shy.
Let your toes tremble in their sandals.
However, pick the grape
and eat with confidence.

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

I’m in pain because the day is ending and somehow I am never healing.

I planned to suffer
and I cannot.

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

I didn’t feel at home in life.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

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

There once was a miller
with a daughter as lovely as a grape.
He told the king that she could
spin gold out of common straw.
The king summoned the girl
and locked her in a room full of straw
and told her to spin it into gold
or she would die like a criminal.
Poor grape with no one to pick.
Luscious and round and sleek.
Poor thing.
To die and never see Brooklyn.

(Rumpelstiltskin)

The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

Our bodies were trash.
We leave them on the shore.

the thing with October is, I think, it somehow gets in your very blood. Unapologetically. Almost ruthlessly.