Anne Sexton quotes - page 4

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. (Anne Sexton)
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. View quote
Anne Sexton
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. View quote
Anne Sexton
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. View quote
Anne Sexton
As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. View quote
Anne Sexton
I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964. ]. View quote
Anne Sexton
Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings. View quote
Anne Sexton
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. View quote
Anne Sexton
You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going. View quote
Anne Sexton
Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind. View quote
Anne Sexton
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... (Anne Sexton)
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float. View quote
Anne Sexton
Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats. View quote
Anne Sexton
Why have your eyes gone into their own room? View quote
Anne Sexton
It would be pleasant to be drunk: faithless to my tongue and hands, giving up the boundaries for the heroic gin. Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool. I will try it shortly. View quote
Anne Sexton
You said the anger would come back just as the love did. View quote
Anne Sexton
Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes. View quote
Anne Sexton
I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. View quote
Anne Sexton
I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss. I am pushing knives through the hands that created two into one. Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor. View quote
Anne Sexton
Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened. View quote
Anne Sexton
What can I do with this memory? Shake the bones out of it? Defoliate the smile? Stub out the chin with cigarettes? Take the face of the man I love and squeeze my foot into it, when all the while my heart is making a museum? I love you the way the oboe plays. I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel. I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes. Yet I fear you, as one in the desert fears the sun. (Anne Sexton)
I am alive when your fingers are. View quote
Anne Sexton
He puts his bones back on, Turning the clock back an hour. She knows flesh, that skin balloon, the unbound limbs, the boards, the roof, the removable roof. She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, when it is over he places her, like a phone, back on the hook. View quote
Anne Sexton
We all walk softly away. We would stay and be the nurse but there are too many of us and we are too worried to help. It is love that walks away and yet we have terrible mouths and soft milk hands. We worry with like. We walk away like love. View quote
Anne Sexton
My mouth blooms like a cut. I've been wronged all year, tedious nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby crybaby, you fool! View quote
Anne Sexton