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
Stranger
Opening
Inside
Dead
Heart
Clam
Like
Clams
Agreeable
Closing

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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.
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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
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All who love have lied.
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.
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Need is not quite belief.
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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
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I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.
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Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.
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I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
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women are born twice.
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To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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 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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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
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