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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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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Think
Insight
Thinking
Mess
Like
Writers
Usually
Wise
Phonies
Live
Messes
Sometimes
Phony
Something
Insights

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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.
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We are all writing God's poem.
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I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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women are born twice.
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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.
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
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I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
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You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
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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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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
Anne Sexton
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Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
Anne Sexton