Quote

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

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
Waiting
Beautiful
Shelf
Counting
Shelves
Silent

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
Anne Sexton
Image
Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
Anne Sexton
Image
Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.
Anne Sexton
Image
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
Anne Sexton
Image
And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
Anne Sexton
Image
The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
Anne Sexton
Image
I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
Image
And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, My need is more desperate! and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.
Anne Sexton
Image
I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
Anne Sexton
Image
When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
Anne Sexton
Image
I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
Anne Sexton
Image
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Anne Sexton
Image
I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.
Anne Sexton
Image
the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.
Anne Sexton
Image
My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
Image
Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
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
Today life opened inside me like an egg.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am younger each year at the first snow.
Anne Sexton
Image
It would be pleasant to be drunk.
Anne Sexton