Quotes from Anne Sexton

If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.

How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float.

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.

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

This November there seems to be nothing to say.

The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?

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

Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.

The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.

Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it's all gone, the whole world falls apart.

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.

I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.

I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...

The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.

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

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

Some women marry houses.