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Anne Sexton Quotes | Quotes said by Anne Sexton

  • Anne Sexton Quote #1

    Her Kind

    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 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 have ridden in your cart, driver,
    waved my nude arms at villages going by,
    learning the last bright routes, survivor
    where your flames still bite my thigh
    and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
    A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
    I have been her kind.


  • Anne Sexton Quote #2

    Words

    Be careful of words,
    even the miraculous ones.
    For the miraculous we do our best,
    sometimes they swarm like insects
    and leave not a sting but a kiss.
    They can be as good as fingers.
    They can be as trusty as the rock
    you stick your bottom on.
    But they can be both daisies and bruises.
    Yet I am in love with words.
    They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
    They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
    They are the trees, the legs of summer,
    and the sun, its passionate face.
    Yet often they fail me.
    I have so much I want to say,
    so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
    But the words aren't good enough,
    the wrong ones kiss me.
    Sometimes I fly like an eagle
    but with the wings of a wren.
    But I try to take care
    and be gentle to them.
    Words and eggs must be handled with care.
    Once broken they are impossible
    things to repair.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #3

    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.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #4

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

  • Anne Sexton Quote #5

    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.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #6

    Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #7

    Death's in the good-bye.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #8

    Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #9

    Depression is boring, I think
    and I would do better to make
    some soup and light up the cave.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #10

    Do you like me?”
    No answer.
    Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
    and sat between us
    and clogged my throat.
    It slaughtered my trust.
    It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
    We exchanged blind words,
    and I did not cry,
    I did not beg,
    but blackness filled my ears,
    blackness lunged in my heart,
    and something that had been good,
    a sort of kindly oxygen,
    turned into a gas oven.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #11

    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?

  • Anne Sexton Quote #12

    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.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #13

    Fee-fi-fo-fum -
    Now I'm borrowed.
    Now I'm numb.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #14

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

  • Anne Sexton Quote #15

    Give me your skin
    as sheer as a cobweb,
    let me open it up
    and listen in and scoop out the dark.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #16

    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.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #17

    He turns the key.
    Presto!
    It opens this book of odd tales
    which transform the Brothers Grimm.
    Transform?
    As if an enlarged paper clip
    could be a piece of sculpture.
    (And it could.)

  • Anne Sexton Quote #18

    I am God, la de dah.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #19

    I am stuffing your mouth with your
    promises and watching
    you vomit them out upon my face.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #20

    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)

  • Anne Sexton Quote #21

    I 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.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #22

    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.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #23

    I like you; your eyes are full of language.

    [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

  • Anne Sexton Quote #24

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

  • Anne Sexton Quote #25

    It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #26

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

  • Anne Sexton Quote #27

    KELIMELER

    Kelimelere dikkat et,
    Özellikle mucizevi olanlara.
    Mucizevi olanlar için en iyisini yapariz,
    Bazen böcek sürüsü gibi toplanirlar
    Sokmazlar ama bir öpücük birakirlar.
    Parmaklar kadar iyi olabilirler.
    Oturdugun kaya kadar güvenilir...
    Ayni zamanda hem papatyalar hem de yaralar gibi...

    Sözcüklere asigim, evet.
    Tavandan sarkan kugular onlar,
    Kucagimda duran alti kutsal portakal,
    Agaçlar onlar, yazin bacaklari,
    Ve günes, onun tutkulu yüzü.

    Genellikle yanilttilar beni.
    Söylemek istedigim çok sey vardi,
    Çok fazla hikaye, görüntü, atasözü ve saire...
    Ama kelimeler yeterince iyi degil.
    Yanlis olanlari öptü beni.

    Bazen bir kartal gibi uçarim
    Ama bir çalikusunun kanatlariyla.
    Yine de dikkat etmeye çalisirim
    Ve onlara nazik davranmaya.
    Kelimeler ve yumurtalar dikkatle tasinmalidir.
    Bir kere kirildilar mi, tamiri imkansizdir.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #28

    Live or die, but don't poison everything.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #29

    Live or die, but don't poison everything...

    Well, death's been here
    for a long time --
    it has a hell of a lot
    to do with hell
    and suspicion of the eye
    and the religious objects
    and how I mourned them
    when they were made obscene
    by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
    The chief ingredient
    is mutilation.
    And mud, day after day,
    mud like a ritual,
    and the baby on the platter,
    cooked but still human,
    cooked also with little maggots,
    sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
    the damn bitch!

    Even so,
    I kept right on going on,
    a sort of human statement,
    lugging myself as if
    I were a sawed-off body
    in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
    This became perjury of the soul.
    It became an outright lie
    and even though I dressed the body
    it was still naked, still killed.
    It was caught
    in the first place at birth,
    like a fish.
    But I play it, dressed it up,
    dressed it up like somebody's doll.

    Is life something you play?
    And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
    And further, everyone yelling at you
    to shut up. And no wonder!
    People don't like to be told
    that you're sick
    and then be forced
    to watch
    you
    come
    down with the hammer.

    Today life opened inside me like an egg
    and there inside
    after considerable digging
    I found the answer.
    What a bargain!
    There was the sun,
    her yolk moving feverishly,
    tumbling her prize --
    and you realize she does this daily!
    I'd known she was a purifier
    but I hadn't thought
    she was solid,
    hadn't known she was an answer.
    God! It's a dream,
    lovers sprouting in the yard
    like celery stalks
    and better,
    a husband straight as a redwood,
    two daughters, two sea urchings,
    picking roses off my hackles.
    If I'm on fire they dance around it
    and cook marshmallows.
    And if I'm ice
    they simply skate on me
    in little ballet costumes.

    Here,
    all along,
    thinking I was a killer,
    anointing myself daily
    with my little poisons.
    But no.
    I'm an empress.
    I wear an apron.
    My typewriter writes.
    It didn't break the way it warned.
    Even crazy, I'm as nice
    as a chocolate bar.
    Even with the witches' gymnastics
    they trust my incalculable city,
    my corruptible bed.

    O dearest three,
    I make a soft reply.
    The witch comes on
    and you paint her pink.
    I come with kisses in my hood
    and the sun, the smart one,
    rolling in my arms.
    So I say Live
    and turn my shadow three times round
    to feed our puppies as they come,
    the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
    despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
    Despite the pails of water that waited,
    to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
    they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
    and fumbling for the tiny tits.
    Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
    3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
    each
    like a
    birch tree.
    I promise to love more if they come,
    because in spite of cruelty
    and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
    I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
    The poison just didn't take.
    So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
    repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
    I say Live, Live because of the sun,
    the dream, the excitable gift.

  • Anne Sexton Quote #30

    Many women are singing together of this:
    one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
    one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
    one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
    one is at the toll gate collecting,
    one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
    one is straddling a cello in Russia,
    one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
    one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
    one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
    one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
    one is wiping the ass of her child,
    one is staring out the window of a train
    in the middle of Wyoming and one is
    anywhere and some are everywhere and all
    seem to be singing, although some can not
    sing a note.

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