Anne Sexton Quotes - Page 12

Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.

I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.

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.

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.

My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.

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

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.

Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.

Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.

Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.

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

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.

With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.

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

Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins.

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

I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.

I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...

Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!

I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.

My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.

I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

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.