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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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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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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
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I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
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I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
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A woman who writes feels too much.
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Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
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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Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
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Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.
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I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Anne Sexton
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And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself
Anne Sexton
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Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Anne Sexton
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
Anne Sexton
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I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.
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Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
Anne Sexton
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
Anne Sexton