Quote

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

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
Poet
Poetry
Words
Business
Better
Swarming
Like
Coins
Bees
Labels

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
Anne Sexton
Image
I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.
Anne Sexton
Image
Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Anne Sexton
Image
I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
Anne Sexton
Image
The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
Anne Sexton
Image
To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
Anne Sexton
Image
When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
Anne Sexton
Image
What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
Anne Sexton
Image
Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
Anne Sexton
Image
I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
Anne Sexton
Image
Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
Anne Sexton