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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

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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
Emotion
Zeal
Effort
Altogether
Written
Excess
Words
Greed
Woman
Useless
Find
Loves
Many
Poet
Always
Poetry

More quotes by 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.
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Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.
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We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
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You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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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.
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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
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Rats live on no evil star
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
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If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.
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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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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
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Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?
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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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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.
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I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.
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Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
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The sanest thing in this world is love.
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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
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