Quotes from Anne Sexton

I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.

Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.

Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

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

To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Poetry to me is prayer.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Until I was twenty-eight, I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren

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 nightmares out.

this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.

I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.

Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman

Though they washed her with wineand rubbed her with butterit was to no avail.She lay as still as a gold piece.

You, Doctor Martin, walkfrom breakfast to madness. Late August,I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talkof pushing their bones against the thrustof cure. And I am queen of this summer hotelor the laughing bee on a stalkof death.

Beauty is a simple passion,but, oh my friends, in the endyou will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.

emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea...