Quotes from Anne Sexton

A good mixture of nothing and everything is eating up my head alive.

Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.

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

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I am, to be sure, afraid that if you knew me that you wouldn't love me. But this must be faced…I fear it in any relationship. Thus I am perhaps afraid to reveal facts about things…or to say too much for fear if I make too much noise you'll drift away, pull down the shade of your ivory tower…and after that. Afraid, I guess, that I'll loose you…I keep losing people.

And then I knew that the voice of the spirits had been let in-- as intense as an epileptic aura-- and that no longer would I sing alone.

It is snowing and death bugs me as stubborn as insomnia.

Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.

The trouble is that I am crazy and the room, ah, my own room drinks me.

I am surprised to see that the ocean is still going on.

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

the thing with October is, I think, it somehow gets in your very blood. Unapologetically. Almost ruthlessly.

This one day her mother gave her a basket of wine and cake to take to her grandmother because she was ill. Wine and cake? Where's the aspirin? The penicillin? Where's the fruit juice? Peter Rabbit got camomile tea. But wine and cake it was.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe- that miniature map of the world- and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard, I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

From "Her Kind" I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

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

My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.

From Camus' notebooks … "an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.

The children are all crying in their pens and the surf carries their cries away. They are old men who have seen too much, their mouths are full of dirty clothes, the tongues poverty, tears like puss. The surf pushes their cries back. Listen.

She is so naked and singular She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid. As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off. (For My Lover, Returning To His Wife)

We make a stage set out of my past and stuff painted puppets into it. We make a bridge toward my future and I cry to you: I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.