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Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.

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
Spot
Throat
Spots
Wear
Slaps
Grow
Rouge
Grows
Thumbs
Like
Slap
Assault

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I burn the way money burns.
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The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
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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 brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
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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 am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
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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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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
Anne Sexton
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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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life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton