Anne Sexton Quotes

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.

I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.

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

The sanest thing in this world is love.

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

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.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.