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
Dead
Heart
Clam
Like
Clams
Agreeable
Closing
Stranger
Opening
Inside

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
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Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.
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I like you your eyes are full of language. [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
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Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
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For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
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Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
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All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
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Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice.
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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Our children tremble in their teen-age cribs, whirling off on a thumb or a motorcycle.
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The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
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My mouth blooms like a cut.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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A woman who writes feels too much.
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What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
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Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?
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