Anne Sexton Quotes - Page 7

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.

Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.

Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.

I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.

O starry night, This is how I want to die

But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.

I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

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.

... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

I grow old on my bitterness.

life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.

If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.