Quote

I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.

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
Spread
Examined
Flaws

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
It would be pleasant to be drunk.
Anne Sexton
Image
As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
Anne Sexton
Image
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
Image
Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
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
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
Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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
Image
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
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
I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
Anne Sexton
Image
Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne Sexton
Image
Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
Anne Sexton
Image
And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...
Anne Sexton
Image
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
Anne Sexton
Image
I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
Anne Sexton
Image
Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
Anne Sexton