Quotes from Anne Sexton

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.

God is only mocked by believers.

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.

Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.

No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.

There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.

Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.

I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.

For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.

I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.

Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.

When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.

The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.

I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.

I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.