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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.

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
Called
Neighbor
Debts
Hope
Debt
Vacuums
Write
Lips
Writing
Motivation
Vacuum
Pay
Stale
Drink
Neighbors
Hair
Yellow
Joy
Poem

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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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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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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
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Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
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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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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
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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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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
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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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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
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Death's in the good-bye.
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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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I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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