Quote

It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.

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
Like
Clams
Agreeable
Closing
Stranger
Opening
Inside
Dead
Heart
Clam

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A woman who writes feels too much.
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I have been cut in two.
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Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
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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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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
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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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There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
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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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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
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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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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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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.
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Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have.
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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
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If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
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And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
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Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.
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My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.
Anne Sexton