Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.”

— Anne Sexton

202. “The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.”

— Anne Sexton

203. “I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.”

— Anne Sexton

204. “No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.”

— Anne Sexton

205. “It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious.”

— Anne Sexton

206. “Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.”

— Anne Sexton

207. “Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.”

— Anne Sexton

208. “The sanest thing in this world is love.”

— Anne Sexton

209. “Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

— Anne Sexton

210. “All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.”

— Anne Sexton

211. “I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn’t come back.”

— Anne Sexton

212. “For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.”

— Anne Sexton

213. “No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.”

— Anne Sexton

214. “I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they’re money.”

— Anne Sexton

215. “I don’t know if I can go on spilling myself out to people – those strange strangers.”

— Anne Sexton

216. “Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father’s genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.”

— Anne Sexton

217. “Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.”

— Anne Sexton

218. “I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.”

— Anne Sexton

219. “I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable – so moist and breathlike.”

— Anne Sexton

220. “I want to calm down, to rest, to outlive this nonsense.”

— Anne Sexton

221. “Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

223. “The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.”

— Anne Sexton

224. “My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict...”

— Anne Sexton

225. “The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.”

— Anne Sexton

226. “I wonder if the artist ever lives his life – he is so busy recreating it.”

— Anne Sexton

227. “Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.”

— Anne Sexton

228. “The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.”

— Anne Sexton

229. “Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.”

— Anne Sexton

230. “Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.”

— Anne Sexton

231. “I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.”

— Anne Sexton

232. “All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.”

— Anne Sexton

233. “When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.”

— Anne Sexton

234. “The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.”

— Anne Sexton

235. “You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.”

— Anne Sexton

236. “Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.”

— Anne Sexton

237. “I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.”

— Anne Sexton

238. “He said loudly ‘I am not dying’ and I said ’for me you are.”

— Anne Sexton

239. “What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.”

— Anne Sexton

240. “You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies.”

— Anne Sexton

241. “I am so tired of that old suffering.”

— Anne Sexton

242. “Today life opened inside me like an egg...”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

244. “In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.”

— Anne Sexton

245. “Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.”

— Anne Sexton

246. “And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything...”

— Anne Sexton

247. “My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.”

— Anne Sexton

248. “All in all, I’d say, the world is strangling.”

— Anne Sexton

249. “I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don’t they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.”

— Anne Sexton

250. “Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.”

— Anne Sexton