Quotes by Anne Sexton

exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

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.

But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

It is snowing and death bugs meas stubborn as insomnia.

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

Clover[s] eyes are full of language.

Quite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headIm undergoing open-heart surgery.

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

He turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)

Fee-fi-fo-fum, now Im borrowed, now Im numb.

Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? Thats another kind of prison.Its not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon melike some sleeping jellyfish.What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help -this life after death?

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

Love your selfs self where it lives.

It doesnt matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.

Deaths in the good-bye.

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”