Quote

Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.

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
Dead
Feet
Take
Graveyard
Foot
Busy

More quotes by 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
The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
Anne Sexton
Image
being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
Anne Sexton
Image
My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Anne Sexton
Image
Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Anne Sexton
Image
... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.
Anne Sexton
Image
It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
Image
Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton
Image
God is only mocked by believers.
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
Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.
Anne Sexton
Image
I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
Image
Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far.
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
Anne Sexton
Image
Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne Sexton
Image
In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
Anne Sexton
Image
The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton
Image
Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.
Anne Sexton