Quotes from Anne Sexton

I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.

Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.

Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.

All who love have lied.

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.

I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.

These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.

I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.

O starry night, This is how I want to die

I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

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

Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.

Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.

I said to my doctor at the beginning, 'I'm no good; I can't do anything. I'm dumb.' He suggested I try educating myself by listening to Boston's educational TV station. He said I had a perfectly good mind.