Quotes from Anne Sexton

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

Rats live on no evil star

To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

I should be working and not writing you. But this is a missing you, where are you, hello and necessary for my soul.

Just once I knew what life was for.

How you choose to lose yourself matters. Trust me, it's all in the 'how'. It matters a lot.

She married the prince and all went well except for the fear — the fear of sleep. Briar Rose was an insomniac... She could not nap or lie in sleep without the court chemist mixing her some knock-out drops and never in the prince's presence.

madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet…

Now he is gone as you are gone. But he belongs to me like lost baggage.

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.

I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything." Anne Sexton, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958)

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions

Need is not quite belief.

I planned to suffer and I cannot.

I'd won the world but like a forsaken explorer, I'd lost my map.

Hesitate in August. Be shy. Let your toes tremble in their sandals. However, pick the grape and eat with confidence.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.

I'm in pain because the day is ending and somehow I am never healing.

If someone burns out your eye I will take your socket and use it for an ashtray.