Quotes from Anne Sexton

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

It is June. I am tired of being brave. from "The Truth The Dead Know

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will be painted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for these many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off your life like trousers, your shoes, your underwear, then take off your flesh, unpick the lock of your bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.

and she wore gowns as lovely as kisses…

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection

My heart cracked like a doll-dish...

I think language is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful (surely the root of language), except that it is painful.

Annie, Annie you sang and I knew you drove a pure gold car and put diamonds in you coke for the crunchy sound, the adorable sound and the moon too was in your portfolio

He turns the key. Presto! It opens this book of odd tales which transform the Brothers Grimm. Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip could be a piece of sculpture. (And it could.)

It was built on air and ghosts…it was truly beautiful but it died…because it tried to get real and it was never real.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

Your hands found me like an architect.

I need someone, aside from pain, to rock me out, away, alone.

the drunken poet (a genuis by daylight)

She owns her own hunger.

Sleep without pills? impossible. take pills! death? have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

I am not seeing anyone or writing anyone—I'm on my 8th draft of this play and how many more—God knows.

I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.

During the rainstorms of April the oyster rises from the sea and opens its shell - rain enters it - when it sinks the raindrops become the pearl. So take a picnic, open your body, and give birth to pearls. â €

Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound

Next I dream the love is swallowing itself. Next I dream the love is made of glass," — Anne Sexton, from "The Break Away," The Complete Poems . (Mariner Books; First Mariner Books Edition (April 28, 1999) Originally published September 30th 1981.

Language is verbalizing the non-verbal. (That's what makes it so complicated.) Holding hands is better than saying "I love you.