Quotes from Linda Gray Sexton

Dogs have always provided a special kind of love and companionship that I experience only some of the time with humans. They have a strong sense of character and live the way we ought to: dogs never compare you to your sister nor make judgments in her favor. Dogs never know what is coming and so live purely in the moment, savoring the good, doing their best to endure the bad--and they offer up this miraculous example so that we can learn from it.

Why, in fact, is the word pain rarely used when describing depression? The dictionary uses synonyms such as melancholy, despondency, and sadness.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.

Because I found out that a little love is better than no love at all.

this single memory, coupled with the others of Mother masturbating on me early in the mornings, or in front of me when I was small, was ample.

I have discovered that love and empathy play side by side with anger, fear, and resentment.

except that a fugue was marked by lassitude while a trance could sometimes be accompanied by activity, such as masturbating or talking.

A poem wasn't really a poem, it seemed to her, unless it was full of metaphor; it took her a while to adjust to the prosody she heard in his work.

One afternoon Mother called to tell me she expected me to testify against my father: "I need you to say that you witnessed him beating me up, that I was afraid for my life.

I did not want to be recognized as "Anne Sexton's daughter," and I was running from that label as hard as I could.

Mommy?" I plead. "Please?" "No," she pouts. "I'm nine!" "Please," I say and start to sob, my chest heaving its burden up and down. "I'm nine!" "Please be thirty-four!

how do we learn to accept and forgive those who have both succeeded and failed in helping us become who we are?

To speak candidly, with neither justification nor humiliation, relieves the haunting of memory and mind and becomes one way to regain our dignity and our strength.

How much am I willing to endure in order to remember? Do I truly want to be empowered by memory or language?

She had told Dr. Orne that Plath "took something that was mine—that death was mine!

writing is magic because it harnesses the energy generated by the chaos within.

No daughter would ever want to know these intimate details about her mother's life.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror or my own selfish death outstared me ... I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. It's a small thing to rage inside your own bowl. At first it was private. Then it was more than myself.

Depression is boring, I think, and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave. —ANNE SEXTON, "THE FURY OF RAIN STORMS

The speed with which Anne Sexton found acceptance within the cadre of the literary elite was indeed remarkable, but it belied the work required.

More often, a poem went through twenty or thirty drafts with amazing numbers of alterations

Maybe why I want Kayo to beat me up is to prove he's a man and I'm a woman," she mused to Dr. Orne. "I want him to be aggressive.

Every month I watched my father scrape to pay his bills, sending Mother a monthly child-support check from which neither Joy nor I ever saw a dime.

It hurt to be so alone. It hurt to be forgotten.