Quotes from Anne Sexton

The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.

My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.

the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.

you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.

I tell you what you'll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.

Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.

Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle.

In a dream you are never eighty.

I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.

I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.

Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.

The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.

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

Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.

If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.

Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.

I know this now. Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing yet they give their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have and we live i

Live or die, But don't poison everything.

I've grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by

I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take that away.