Quotes from Anne Sexton

You fell, she said, just remember you fell. I fell, is all he told the doctors in the big hospital. A nice lady came and asked him questions but because he didn't want to be sent away he said, I fell. He never said anything else although he could talk fine.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ("You, Doctor Martin")

They could not listen. They could not stop. What they did was the death dance. What they did would do them in.

The butterfly owns her now. It covers her and her wounds.

Sun, you hammer of yellow,  you hat on fire,  you honeysuckle mama,  pour your blonde on me!  Let me laugh for an entire hour  at your supreme being, your Cadillac stuff,  because I've come a long way  from Brussels sprouts. 

I do have that bad habit, so female, of taking people at their word.

I don't know if I can go on spilling myself out to people—those strange strangers.

Now listen, life is lovely, but I CAN'T LIVE IT. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds … but if you knew how it FELT.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

I am going to lose myself – or else, the chance is that poetry will save me.

Everyone in me is a bird. I am beating my wings. They wanted to cut you out but they will not. They said you were immeasurably empty bu you are not. They said you were sick unto dying but they were wrong. You are winging like a school girl. You are not torn.

I feel myself beginning to love you instead of just need you. I don't think I have ever loved anyone in my life, not really – just needed them, wanted them to love me to possess me – to become such a part of someone I could lose my frightened self…

My bones are loose as clothespins, as abandoned as dolls in a toy shop and my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins revved up like an engine that would not stop.

We moved like angels washing themselves. We moved like two birds on fire. — Anne Sexton, from "How We Danced" in "The Death of the Fathers," The Norton Anthology of American Literature , ed. Baym et al, 5th edition, Volume 2, (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998)

Someone is dead.  Even the trees know it

I wear silk -- the cover to uncover -- because silk is what I want you to think of. But I dislike the cloth. It is too stern. So tell me anything but track me like a climber for here is the eye, here is the jewel, here is the excitement the nipple learns. I am unbalanced -- but I am not mad with snow. I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering... I burn the way money burns.

So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

It was also my violent heart that broke, falling down the front hall stairs. It was also a message I never spoke, calling, riser after riser, who cares...

I have a room of my own. Rain drops onto it. Rain drops down like worms From the trees onto my frontal bone. Haunted, always haunted by rain, the room affirms The words that I will make alone. — Mother And Jack and The Rain.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

I do a death dance, I lay a snake skin…

Personally I'd give ten thousand bucks to be a psychiatrist and not a writer.

A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I am so tired of that old suffering.