Quote

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

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
Long
Bones
Atomic
Tongue
Adultery
Merely
Theft
Sin
Stretching
Evil
Bone
Soul
Picking
Take
Worms
Dines
Heart
Sins
Dine

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
Anne Sexton
Image
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
Image
For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
Anne Sexton
Image
... 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.
Anne Sexton
Image
Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.
Anne Sexton
Image
Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
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
I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
Anne Sexton
Image
As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
Anne Sexton
Image
The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton
Image
I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
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
You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
Anne Sexton
Image
Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Anne Sexton
Image
I burn the way money burns.
Anne Sexton
Image
My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
Anne Sexton
Image
Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
Anne Sexton