Anne Sexton
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.Collection: Fathers
Death's in the good-bye.Collection: Death
These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.Collection: Fear
I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Live or die, but don't poison everything.
In a dream you are never eighty.
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
Until I was twenty-eight, I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths.
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 nightmares out.
I said to my doctor at the beginning, 'I'm no good; I can't do anything. I'm dumb.' He suggested I try educating myself by listening to Boston's educational TV station. He said I had a perfectly good mind.
God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.
Need is not quite belief.
Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.
Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
I want to be a child and not a mother, and I feel guilty about this.
Even without wars, life is dangerous.
My mother was top billing in our house.
Before I was married, I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baking a potato.
The joy that isn't shared dies young.
Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.
I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.
I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.Collection: Who I Am
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.Collection: Mind
Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.Collection: Soul
I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Love
As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.Collection: Said
Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.Collection: Bruises
I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.Collection: Home
Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.Collection: Heart
Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.Collection: Prayer
I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.Collection: Book
I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.Collection: Crazy
One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.Collection: White
...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.Collection: Soul
The sanest thing in this world is love.Collection: Positive Thinking
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.Collection: Children
And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...Collection: Auras
I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.Collection: Hunting