Quote

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

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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Anne Sexton
Image
My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
Anne Sexton
Image
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
Anne Sexton
Image
I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
Anne Sexton
Image
I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
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
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
Anne Sexton
Image
I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
Anne Sexton
Image
I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere.
Anne Sexton
Image
Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
Image
Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton
Image
And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
Anne Sexton
Image
Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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
Image
But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
Anne Sexton
Image
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
Image
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