Quote

I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.

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
Perhaps
Bars
Future
Sell
Pain
Breath
Firsts
Breaths
First
Sells
Would
Begins
Crib
Life
Avoid
Drill
Planets
Drills

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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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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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
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I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
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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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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
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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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For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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In a dream you are never eighty.
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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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