Anne Sexton Quotes
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251. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

253. “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

254. “The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

256. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

258. “God is only mocked by believers.”

— Anne Sexton

259. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

264. “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

265. “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

266. “I have been cut in two.”

— Anne Sexton

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

270. “Death’s in the good-bye.”

— Anne Sexton

271. “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

272. “Some women marry houses.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

281. “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

282. “Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

284. “Need is not quite belief.”

— Anne Sexton

285. “I grow old on my bitterness.”

— Anne Sexton

286. “Letters are false really – they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are...”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

288. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

290. “Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle...”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

292. “I didn’t feel at home in life.”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

294. “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

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

— Anne Sexton

296. “How you choose to lose yourself matters. Trust me, it’s all in the ‘how’. It matters a lot.”

— Anne Sexton

297. “My heart cracked like a doll-dish...”

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

299. “I do have that bad habit, so female, of taking people at their word.”

— Anne Sexton

300. “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