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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.

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
Even
Sex
Saying
Feeling
Feelings
Beautiful
Better
Whole
Writing
Poem

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
Anne Sexton
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
Anne Sexton
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My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
Anne Sexton
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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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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton
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My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
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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
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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
Anne Sexton
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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
Anne Sexton
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
Anne Sexton
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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
Anne Sexton
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I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
Anne Sexton
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
Anne Sexton
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
Anne Sexton
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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
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Anne Sexton
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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
Anne Sexton