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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.

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
Dies
Slides
Better
Corpses
Great
Worms
Would
Sigh
Think
Believed
Thinking
Anymore
Daisies
Like
Ears
Corpse
Listen
Slide

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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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unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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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.
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No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.
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When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
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women are born twice.
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Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
Anne Sexton
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I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
Anne Sexton
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All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.
Anne Sexton
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I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.
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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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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.
Anne Sexton