Quote

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

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
Didn
Rope
Back
Tied
Shut
Come
Head
Time
Came
Like
Eyes
Clams
Eye
Bowl
Death
Bowls

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And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
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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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Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.
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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.
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They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
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All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.
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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
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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
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In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
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And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
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Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.
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Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
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Even without wars, life is dangerous.
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