Quote

Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.

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
Even
Waiting
Ingredients
Made
Lasts
Salt
Would
Last
Lust
Time
Lost
Stealing
Keep
Yesterday
Rites
Money
Calm
Rite
Today
Toward
Ingredient
Whole
Prove
Steal

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There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
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Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?
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It is June. I am tired of being brave.
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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.
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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
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Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.
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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.
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The joy that isn't shared dies young.
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And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
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After a disaster strikes, it can be very devastating and very challenging. You're going to need a lot of strength and energy, and the American Red Cross suggests you go for the high protein items.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
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Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
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You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
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When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
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In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
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I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
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Need is not quite belief.
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