Quote

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

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
Magic
Eaten
Simply
Craft
Special
Possessed
Enemy
Crafts
Asks
Twice
Carpenters
Taken
Suicide
Suicides
Language
Tools
Carpenter
Never
Build
Declared

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For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
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I burn the way money burns.
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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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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
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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.
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I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.
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Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.
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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.
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.
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We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.
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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
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the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
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I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
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