Quotes from Anne Sexton

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

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house. It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth — hard. Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,haunting the black air, braver at night.

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open,something unsaid, the phone off the hookand the love, whatever it was, an infection.

Death's in the good-bye.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

Meanwhile in my head, I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

O starry night, This is how I want to die

Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.

Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen....

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

I'll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.

That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

the man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate…

And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

I know that I have died before—once in November.