Quote

I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.

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
Tree
Sleep
Maybe
Mailbox
Family
Mailboxes
House
Ladders
Soul
Jewels
Everything
Sign
Dog

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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
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I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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Need is not quite belief.
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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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I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.
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The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
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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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Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
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I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.
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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
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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.
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I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
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Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.
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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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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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