Quote

Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.

Anne Sexton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Men
Inside
Wants
Small
Age
Many

More quotes by Anne Sexton

Image
Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
Anne Sexton
Image
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
Image
... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
Anne Sexton
Image
I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.
Anne Sexton
Image
For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
Anne Sexton
Image
I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne Sexton
Image
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
Image
I burn the way money burns.
Anne Sexton
Image
To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.
Anne Sexton
Image
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.
Anne Sexton
Image
I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
Anne Sexton
Image
Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
Anne Sexton
Image
But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.
Anne Sexton
Image
One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
Anne Sexton
Image
Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
Anne Sexton
Image
Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
Anne Sexton
Image
You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
Anne Sexton
Image
And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself
Anne Sexton
Image
Daisies in water are the longest lasting flower you can give to someone. Fact. Buy daisies. Not roses.
Anne Sexton
Image
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