Quotes from Anne Sexton

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Our bodies were trash. We leave them on the shore.

Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am. Daddy? That's another kind of prison. It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help - this life after death?

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling "Oh." I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

Probably I am a fool…most poets are fools…but for some reason I love faith, but have none.

Oh, all right, I say, I'll save myself.

No. Not really red, but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

I tell you what you'll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.

I didn't feel at home in life.

to be loved and found magical, like a secret…

exI 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.

And there you are. And I liked you a lot today. A lot. And I want to talk to you. Selfishly.

The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies

I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

I am unbalanced — but I am not mad with snow. I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering… I burn the way money burns.

Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots, into the hypnotist's trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues.

All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling. And I, in my bed each night, listen to my twenty shoes converse about it. And the moon, under its dark hood, falls out of the sky each night, with its hungry red mouth to suck at my scars.

Moon girls, where did you go?

One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.