Quotes About Emotion

Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.

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

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.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.

Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom and collapse.

It was also my violent heart that broke.

June and July? These are the months we call Boiling Water.

Now listen, life is lovely, but I CAN'T LIVE IT. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds … but if you knew how it FELT.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

I think language is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful (surely the root of language), except that it is painful.

Next I dream the love is swallowing itself. Next I dream the love is made of glass," — Anne Sexton, from "The Break Away," The Complete Poems . (Mariner Books; First Mariner Books Edition (April 28, 1999) Originally published September 30th 1981.

Language is verbalizing the non-verbal. (That's what makes it so complicated.) Holding hands is better than saying "I love you.

I love you. I wish we were real. — Anne Sexton, from a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 28 March 1963, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

Sometimes I feel like another creature, hardly a woman. I can't be a modern woman. I'm a Victorian teenager–at heart.

A woman who writes feels too much, Those trances and portents!

Because we need. Because we are sore creatures.

I burn like money burns.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burdens, his own way.