Quote

The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

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
Death
Mouths
Vibrating
Bird
Muscle
Silence
Shoulder
Eyes
Muscles
Eye
Shock
White
Shoulders
Black
Red
Comes
Mouth
Peck

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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
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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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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
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The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far.
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.
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I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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In a dream you are never eighty.
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
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Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.
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The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.
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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
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Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
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