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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Saints
Moderation
Poets
Saint
Poet
Exuberance

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
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The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
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Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
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Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
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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
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To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.
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I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
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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
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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
Anne Sexton
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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
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The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is the waves fold over each other they are in love with themselves sleeping in their own skin and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.
Anne Sexton
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
Anne Sexton
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I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.
Anne Sexton
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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
Anne Sexton
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Somebody who should have been born is gone.
Anne Sexton
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Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
Anne Sexton
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
Anne Sexton
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I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton