Anne Sexton Quotes - Page 2

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

We are all writing God's poem.

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.

I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.

And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

In a dream you are never eighty.

Mood can be as important as sense.

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

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.

I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.

Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.