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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

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
Always
Mask
Think
Wearing
Thinking
Victim
Along
Longer
White
Black
Writing
Poems

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, My need is more desperate! and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.
Anne Sexton
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Anne Sexton
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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
Anne Sexton
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
Anne Sexton
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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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Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.
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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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
Anne Sexton
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
Anne Sexton
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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
Anne Sexton
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I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
Anne Sexton
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My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.
Anne Sexton
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I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
Anne Sexton
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The snow has quietness in it no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.
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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I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
Anne Sexton
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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
Anne Sexton
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
Anne Sexton