Quotes from Anne Sexton

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

Do you like me?" No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. [...] I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

I'm lost. And it's my own fault. It's about time I figured out that I can't ask people to keep me found.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.

She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.

Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

I am God, la de dah.

I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.

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.

I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.