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Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

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
Like
Carpenter
Suicide
Tools
Build
Special
Asks
Language
Carpenters
Never
Suicides

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.
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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
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Poetry to me is prayer.
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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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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.
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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
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Mood can be as important as sense.
Anne Sexton
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
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When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.
Anne Sexton
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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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
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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
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.
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O starry night, This is how I want to die
Anne Sexton
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Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
Anne Sexton
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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
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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