Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.”

— Anne Sexton

52. “Don’t bite till you know if it’s bread or stone.”

— Anne Sexton

53. “Love your self’s self where it lives.”

— Anne Sexton

54. “Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.”

— Anne Sexton

55. “My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.”

— Anne Sexton

56. “My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.”

— Anne Sexton

57. “My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

59. “Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.”

— Anne Sexton

60. “Rats live on no evil star.”

— Anne Sexton

61. “And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.”

— Anne Sexton

62. “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.”

— Anne Sexton

63. “Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.”

— Anne Sexton

64. “Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.”

— Anne Sexton

65. “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

66. “Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.”

— Anne Sexton

67. “Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings.”

— Anne Sexton

68. “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.”

— Anne Sexton

69. “I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.”

— Anne Sexton

70. “Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.”

— Anne Sexton

71. “Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?”

— Anne Sexton

72. “I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.”

— Anne Sexton

73. “O starry night, This is how I want to die.”

— Anne Sexton

74. “The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.”

— Anne Sexton

75. “Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”

— Anne Sexton

76. “My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.”

— Anne Sexton

77. “Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.”

— Anne Sexton

78. “You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.”

— Anne Sexton

79. “Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”

— Anne Sexton

80. “Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.”

— Anne Sexton

81. “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

82. “If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.”

— Anne Sexton

83. “My mouth blooms like a cut.”

— Anne Sexton

84. “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.”

— Anne Sexton

85. “What’s the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.”

— Anne Sexton

86. “It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.”

— Anne Sexton

87. “My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.”

— Anne Sexton

88. “O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.”

— Anne Sexton

89. “My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.”

— Anne Sexton

90. “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.”

— Anne Sexton

91. “My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.”

— Anne Sexton

92. “I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

94. “My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.”

— Anne Sexton

95. “In a dream you are never eighty.”

— Anne Sexton

96. “I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you...”

— Anne Sexton

97. “Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far...”

— Anne Sexton

98. “Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You’ll move off.”

— Anne Sexton

99. “Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.”

— Anne Sexton

100. “Somebody who should have been born is gone.”

— Anne Sexton