Quotes from Anne Sexton

Need is not quite belief.

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

Before I was married, I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baking a potato.

The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.

... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.

Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.

I burn the way money burns.

Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.

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

There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...

Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.

Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

The sanest thing in this world is love.

We are all writing God's poem.

Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.