Quote

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Anne Sexton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Listen
Inspirational
Beautiful
Soul
Hard
Life
Ears
Creativity
Close

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
Anne Sexton
Image
Watch out for love (unless it is true, and every part of you says yes including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won't be heard and none of your running will run.
Anne Sexton
Image
I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
Anne Sexton
Image
I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
Anne Sexton
Image
I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne Sexton
Image
It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
Anne Sexton
Image
it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
Anne Sexton
Image
Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
Anne Sexton
Image
I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
Anne Sexton
Image
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
Image
Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
Anne Sexton
Image
Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.
Anne Sexton
Image
For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
Anne Sexton
Image
To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
Anne Sexton
Image
I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am younger each year at the first snow.
Anne Sexton
Image
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton