Quote

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

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
Need
Quite
Beef
Needs
Belief
Desperately
Like
Religion
Frozen
Jesus
Pull
Chunk
Christ
Bones
Axes
True
God
Horizontal
Beautiful
Touch
Vertical
Wanted
Arms
Chunks

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
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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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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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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
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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.
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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.
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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
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Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
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In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
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Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.
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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
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Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.
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Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
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Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins.
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As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.
Anne Sexton
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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.
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