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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
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Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle.
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To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.
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Death's in the good-bye.
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I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.
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Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.
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Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
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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 wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
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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.
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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
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I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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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.
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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