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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
Anne Sexton
Image
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
Anne Sexton
Image
Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
Image
Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.
Anne Sexton
Image
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Anne Sexton
Image
You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
Anne Sexton
Image
I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
Image
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
Image
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Anne Sexton
Image
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
Image
Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
Anne Sexton
Image
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
Anne Sexton
Image
Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
Anne Sexton
Image
Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
Anne Sexton
Image
Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn.
Anne Sexton
Image
... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.
Anne Sexton
Image
Poems aren't postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton