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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

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
Mercy
Star
Poet
Pottage
Poetry
Wrangle
Stars
Rats
World
Greedy
Poems
Tongue

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
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Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.
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I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
Anne Sexton
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For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
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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.
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When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.
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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.
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Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
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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.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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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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Love your self's self where it lives.
Anne Sexton
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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
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Today life opened inside me like an egg.
Anne Sexton