Quote

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

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
Live
Messes
Sometimes
Phony
Something
Insights
Think
Insight
Thinking
Mess
Like
Writers
Usually
Wise
Phonies

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.
Anne Sexton
Image
Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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
The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
Anne Sexton
Image
The snow has quietness in it no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.
Anne Sexton
Image
Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
Anne Sexton
Image
Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.
Anne Sexton
Image
Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
Anne Sexton
Image
Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
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
God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
Anne Sexton
Image
unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.
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
Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
Anne Sexton
Image
Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
Anne Sexton