Quotes from Anne Sexton

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

The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far ...

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

And I. I too. Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

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

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

I burn the way money burns.

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

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

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

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

But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

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.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

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

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

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 rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

Don't worry if they say you're crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It's a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.

I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly.

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, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly.