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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

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
Person
Writing
Think
Thinking
Understands
Loves
Reader
Perfect
Persons

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
Anne Sexton
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
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Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
Anne Sexton
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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
Anne Sexton
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Anne Sexton
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Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
Anne Sexton
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
Anne Sexton
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And the aura of you remains, remains, remains...
Anne Sexton
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Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
Anne Sexton
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All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.
Anne Sexton
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It is June. I am tired of being brave.
Anne Sexton
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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
Anne Sexton
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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?
Anne Sexton
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
Anne Sexton
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton
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I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
Anne Sexton
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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?
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