Quote

I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.

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
Wanted
God
Toward
Move
Defaced
Movement
Bowel
Full
Crawl
Religion
Altar
Moving
Altars
House
Bread

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
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Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
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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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... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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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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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.
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The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
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Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.
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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
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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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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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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.
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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
Anne Sexton
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
Anne Sexton
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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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