Quote

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.

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
Order
Witch
Ideas
Nurse
Play
Curse
Things
Radical
Awful
Criticism
Carpenter
Spring
Discontent
Inspirational
Clown

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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
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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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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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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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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
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I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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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.
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Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
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My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.
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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
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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.
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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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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.
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