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

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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Anne Sexton
Image
you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.
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
I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
Anne Sexton
Image
Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
Anne Sexton
Image
There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
Anne Sexton
Image
We are all writing God's poem.
Anne Sexton
Image
... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.
Anne Sexton
Image
Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have.
Anne Sexton
Image
Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
Anne Sexton
Image
Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.
Anne Sexton
Image
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Anne Sexton
Image
I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
Anne Sexton
Image
Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
Anne Sexton
Image
My mouth blooms like a cut.
Anne Sexton
Image
It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
Image
I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Anne Sexton
Image
And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
Anne Sexton
Image
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