Top 300 Anne Sexton Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.”

— Anne Sexton

253. “All who love have lied.”

— Anne Sexton

254. “Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made...”

— Anne Sexton

255. “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

256. “Alone in our place I was a guest.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

258. “I grow old on my bitterness.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

260. “Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.”

— Anne Sexton

261. “If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover...”

— Anne Sexton

262. “Death’s in the good-bye.”

— Anne Sexton

263. “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

264. “I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.”

— Anne Sexton

265. “To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren’t much company.”

— Anne Sexton

266. “Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I’d say, I am rowing, I am rowing...”

— Anne Sexton

267. “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

268. “I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.”

— Anne Sexton

269. “How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?”

— Anne Sexton

270. “I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.”

— Anne Sexton

271. “Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.”

— Anne Sexton

272. “God is only mocked by believers.”

— Anne Sexton

273. “I leave you, home, when I’m ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world...”

— Anne Sexton

274. “Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn’t that enough?”

— Anne Sexton

275. “I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.”

— Anne Sexton

276. “Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.”

— Anne Sexton

277. “Some women marry houses.”

— Anne Sexton

278. “I have been cut in two.”

— Anne Sexton

279. “I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere...”

— Anne Sexton

280. “The trouble is that I am crazy and the room, ah, my own room drinks me.”

— Anne Sexton

281. “I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.”

— Anne Sexton

282. “I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.”

— Anne Sexton

283. “I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.”

— Anne Sexton

284. “A good mixture of nothing and everything is eating up my head alive.”

— Anne Sexton

285. “Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.”

— Anne Sexton

286. “I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.”

— Anne Sexton

287. “One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.”

— Anne Sexton

288. “Personally I’d give ten thousand bucks to be a psychiatrist and not a writer.”

— Anne Sexton

289. “Just once I knew what life was for.”

— Anne Sexton

290. “Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.”

— Anne Sexton

291. “Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don’t always hiss or muck up the day, each day.”

— Anne Sexton

292. “And there you are. And I liked you a lot today. A lot. And I want to talk to you. Selfishly.”

— Anne Sexton

293. “I should be working and not writing you. But this is a missing you, where are you, hello and necessary for my soul.”

— Anne Sexton

294. “Poems aren’t postcards to send home.”

— Anne Sexton

295. “I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.”

— Anne Sexton

296. “It would be pleasant to be drunk.”

— Anne Sexton

297. “Mood can be as important as sense.”

— Anne Sexton

298. “Surely all who are locked in boxes of different sizes should have their hands held.”

— Anne Sexton

299. “Need is not quite belief.”

— Anne Sexton

300. “I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.”

— Anne Sexton