Quotes from Anne Sexton

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, counting this row and that row of moccasins waiting on the silent shelf.

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

Am I to bless the lost you, sitting here with my clumsy soul?

Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.

And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.

I want to sleep all day and night (i.e., not live but not quite die) …

Alone in our place I was a guest.

Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse.

Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

At night the bats will beat on the trees, knowing it all, seeing what they sensed all day....

It was also my violent heart that broke.

He said loudly 'I am not dying' and I said 'for me you are.

From the Garden" Come, my beloved, consider the lilies. We are of little faith. We talk too much. Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks. Let us consider the view: a house where white clouds decorate the muddy halls. Oh, put away your good words and your bad words. Spit out your words like stones! Come here! Come here! Come eat my pleasant fruits.

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are.

June and July? These are the months we call Boiling Water.

I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering.

As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.

I want to calm down, to rest, to outlive this nonsense.

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?

It is not enough to read Hesse and drink clam chowder, we must have the answers.

I am ugly, submerged in my own past and my own madness

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you - you go ahead, go on, go back down, into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your old bad dreams.

Death, with one-eyed jack in his hand, makes a promise to the thirteenth child.

There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God gives milk and I have the pail