Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Anne Sexton

Featured in: Father's Day Quotes

2. “I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”

— Anne Sexton

3. “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”

— Anne Sexton

4. “I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.”

— Anne Sexton

5. “I’m the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.”

— Anne Sexton

6. “I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.”

— Anne Sexton

7. “The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.”

— Anne Sexton

8. “It is June. I am tired of being brave.”

— Anne Sexton

9. “I am God, la de dah.”

— Anne Sexton

10. “It is in the small things we see it. The child’s first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.”

— Anne Sexton

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Quotes About Childhood

11. “Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.”

— Anne Sexton

12. “I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?”

— Anne Sexton

13. “When I’m writing, I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.”

— Anne Sexton

14. “I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.”

— Anne Sexton

15. “Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I’m hung up on it.”

— Anne Sexton

16. “Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.”

— Anne Sexton

17. “As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.”

— Anne Sexton

18. “Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.”

— Anne Sexton

19. “And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

21. “Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know – no matter what they call it.”

— Anne Sexton

22. “The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.”

— Anne Sexton

23. “A woman who writes feels too much.”

— Anne Sexton

24. “Fee-fi-fo-fum – Now I’m borrowed. Now I’m numb.”

— Anne Sexton

25. “I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.”

— Anne Sexton

26. “Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.”

— Anne Sexton

27. “I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs...”

— Anne Sexton

28. “Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.”

— Anne Sexton

29. “Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.”

— Anne Sexton

30. “I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.”

— Anne Sexton

31. “One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.”

— Anne Sexton

32. “I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.”

— Anne Sexton

33. “Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside.”

— Anne Sexton

34. “I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman’s yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.”

— Anne Sexton

35. “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.”

— Anne Sexton

36. “This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue’s wrangle, the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.”

— Anne Sexton

37. “O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.”

— Anne Sexton

38. “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

39. “There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.”

— Anne Sexton

40. “Poetry to me is prayer...”

— Anne Sexton

41. “I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.”

— Anne Sexton

42. “The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.”

— Anne Sexton

43. “Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren.”

— Anne Sexton

44. “I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.”

— Anne Sexton

45. “It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.”

— Anne Sexton

46. “The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.”

— Anne Sexton

47. “To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.”

— Anne Sexton

48. “There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.”

— Anne Sexton

49. “We are all writing God’s poem.”

— Anne Sexton

50. “The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.”

— Anne Sexton