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Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

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
Way
Expressions
False
Letters
Expression
Instead
Wish
Really

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
Anne Sexton
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My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.
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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Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.
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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
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I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
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Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
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I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
Anne Sexton
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
Anne Sexton
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In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
Anne Sexton
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Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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A woman who writes feels too much.
Anne Sexton
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
Anne Sexton
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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
Anne Sexton
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
Anne Sexton