Quotes from Anne Sexton

I love you. I wish we were real. — Anne Sexton, from a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 28 March 1963, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

I give you back your heart. I give you permission – for the fuse inside her, throbbing angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her and the burying of her wound – for the burying of her small red wound alive – for the pale flickering flare under her ribs, for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse

And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.

I grew, and then there were many strange apparitions, the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison and all of that.

Yes. It is the witch's life, climbing the primordial climb, a dream within a dream, then sitting here holding a basket of fire.

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.

I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense.

I with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love.

Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle.

Someone brought me oranges in my despair but I could not eat a one

I am never sane, you know -

Sometimes I feel like another creature, hardly a woman. I can't be a modern woman. I'm a Victorian teenager–at heart.

It was ordained. Just as the fates deal out the plague with a tarot card. Just as the Supreme Being drills holes in our skulls to let the Boston Symphony through.

Well, my rationalization for today is that if "an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself" the same could be said for masturbation or even better for suicide

This is the desk I sit at and this is the desk where I love you too much and this is the typewriter that sits before me where yesterday only your body sat before me

It was pretty rocky last month but I didn't want to depress you with my depressions. I lack contentment. No. I lack a mother.

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers. The bomb opens like a shoebox. And the child? The child is certainly not yawning. And the woman? The woman is bathing her heart. It has been torn out of her and as a last act she is rinsing it off in the river. This is the death market. America, where are your credentials?

Tonight the landscape is fired by moonlight and I am thinking of you somehow.

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

I ate you up. All my need took you down like a meal.

I have come back but disorder is not what it was. I have lost the trick of it! The innocence of it!… Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey, flee this sad hotel, ride out on some hairy beast, gallop backward pressing your buttocks to his withers, sit to his clumsy gait somehow. Ride out any old way you please! In this place everyone talks to his own mouth. That's what it means to be crazy. Those I loved best died of it— the fool's disease.

I want to bite, I want to chew, I want to eat you up.

The great theme we all share is that of becoming ourselves, of overcoming our father and mother, of assuming our identities somehow.

Today is the day they shipped home our summer in two crates and tonight is All Hallows Eve and today you tell me the oak leaves outside your office window will outlast the New England winter. But then, love is where our summer was.