Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself.”

— Anne Sexton

102. “There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.”

— Anne Sexton

103. “The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

105. “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

106. “Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.”

— Anne Sexton

107. “Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.”

— Anne Sexton

108. “Moon girls, where did you go?”

— Anne Sexton

109. “Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice...”

— Anne Sexton

110. “Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.”

— Anne Sexton

111. “I’m hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.”

— Anne Sexton

112. “Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.”

— Anne Sexton

113. “I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.”

— Anne Sexton

114. “I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.”

— Anne Sexton

115. “Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand...”

— Anne Sexton

116. “Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.”

— Anne Sexton

117. “Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber’s tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse...”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

119. “The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.”

— Anne Sexton

120. “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

121. “Take the brown eyes of my father, those gun shots, those mean muds. Bury them. Take the blue eyes of my mother, naked as the sea...”

— Anne Sexton

122. “All day I’ve built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.”

— Anne Sexton

123. “Blue eyes wash off sometimes.”

— Anne Sexton

124. “I burn the way money burns.”

— Anne Sexton

125. “And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope.”

— Anne Sexton

126. “Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have...”

— Anne Sexton

127. “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

128. “Please God, we’re all right here. Please leave us alone. Don’t send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.”

— Anne Sexton

129. “I know that I have died before – once in November, once in June. How strange to choose June again.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

131. “Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long...”

— Anne Sexton

132. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”

— Anne Sexton

133. “I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.”

— Anne Sexton

134. “But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.”

— Anne Sexton

135. “My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all’s certain and good, that the marriage won’t end.”

— Anne Sexton

136. “We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.”

— Anne Sexton

137. “With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.”

— Anne Sexton

138. “You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going.”

— Anne Sexton

139. “Daylight is nobody’s friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.”

— Anne Sexton

140. “One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is “Whatever you do, don’t be boring.””

— Anne Sexton

141. “I didn’t feel at home in life.”

— Anne Sexton

142. “I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.”

— Anne Sexton

143. “The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face. in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.”

— Anne Sexton

144. “Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.”

— Anne Sexton

145. “Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...”

— Anne Sexton

146. “Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.”

— Anne Sexton

147. “The joy that isn’t shared dies young.”

— Anne Sexton

148. “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

149. “Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen...”

— Anne Sexton

150. “Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.”

— Anne Sexton