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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

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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
Happiness
Boat
Nana
Happy
Dirty
Plumber
Comes
Jokes
Sonnet
Every
Tools
Corpse
Time
Bird
Corpses
Wind
Birds
Turn
Joke
Turns
Depression

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
Anne Sexton
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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
Anne Sexton
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
Anne Sexton
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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
Anne Sexton
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I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
Anne Sexton
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[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.
Anne Sexton
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
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Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
Anne Sexton
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I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
Anne Sexton
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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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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Anne Sexton
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Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings
Anne Sexton
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The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
Anne Sexton
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Need is not quite belief.
Anne Sexton
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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
Anne Sexton
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Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
Anne Sexton
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In a dream you are never eighty.
Anne Sexton