Quote

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

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
Soul
Sometimes
Things
Never
Wished
Pictures
Takes
Seen

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne Sexton
Image
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
Image
To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
Anne Sexton
Image
Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Anne Sexton
Image
Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
Anne Sexton
Image
Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Anne Sexton
Image
The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.
Anne Sexton
Image
Rats live on no evil star
Anne Sexton
Image
Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
Anne Sexton
Image
You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
Anne Sexton
Image
Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton
Image
The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.
Anne Sexton
Image
this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.
Anne Sexton