Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.”

— Anne Sexton

203. “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

204. “There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.”

— Anne Sexton

205. “I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections...”

— Anne Sexton

206. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

209. “Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.”

— Anne Sexton

210. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

217. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

219. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

231. “Pain engraves a deeper memory.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

233. “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

234. “God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”

— Anne Sexton

235. “You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.”

— Anne Sexton

236. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

238. “Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?”

— Anne Sexton

239. “All who love have lied.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

242. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

244. “Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

247. “Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?”

— Anne Sexton

248. “As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.”

— Anne Sexton

249. “If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.”

— Anne Sexton

250. “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