Anne Sexton Quotes - Page 13

I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.

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.

I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.

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.

I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.

it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it

I burn the way money burns.

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.

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

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

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.

There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.

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.

stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.

Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside

I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.

I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.

Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.

Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?

Blue eyes wash off sometimes.

There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.

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.