Anne Sexton Love Quotes & Sayings

Again And Again And Again

You said the anger would come back

just as the love did.

I have a black look I do not

like. It is a mask I try on.

I migrate toward it and its frog

sits on my lips and defecates.

It is old. It is also a pauper.

I have tried to keep it on a diet.

I give it no unction.

There is a good look that I wear

like a blood clot. I have

sewn it over my left breast.

I have made a vocation of it.

Lust has taken plant in it

and I have placed you and your

child at its milk tip.

Oh the blackness is murderous

and the milk tip is brimming

and each machine is working

and I will kiss you when

I cut up one dozen new men

and you will die somewhat,

again and again. — Anne Sexton

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. — Anne Sexton

I am teaching ... It's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros. — Anne Sexton

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere. — Anne Sexton

Yet love enters my blood like an I.V.,
dripping in its little white moments. — Anne Sexton

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But 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

Love your self's self where it lives. — Anne Sexton

Probably I am a fool ... most poets are fools ... but for some reason I love faith, but have none. — Anne Sexton

I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me. — Anne Sexton

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

Evil is maybe lying to God.
Or better, lying to love. — Anne Sexton

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

I love the word warm.
It is almost unbearable
so moist and breathlike. — Anne Sexton

I don't care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here. — Anne Sexton

Was it last month or last year
that the ambulance ran like a hearse
with its siren blowing on suicide -
Dinn, dinn, dinn! -
a noon whistle that kept insisting on life
all the way through the traffic lights?

I have come back
but disorder is not what it was.
I have lost the trick of it!
The innocence of it!
That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat
with his fiery joke, his manic smile -
even he seems blurred, small and pale.
I have come back,
recommitted,
fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger,
held like a prisoner
who was so poor
he fell in love with jail. — Anne Sexton

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence. — Francesca Lia Block

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, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958) — Anne Sexton

When I lie down to love,
old dwarf heart shakes her head.
Like an imbecile she was born old. — Anne Sexton

If someone burns out your eye
I will take your socket
and use it for an ashtray. — Anne Sexton

I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow? — Anne Sexton

We do not explain my husband's insane abuse
and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled
or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead.
Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use. — Anne Sexton

All who love have lied. — Anne Sexton

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes),
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will run. — Anne Sexton

If I could blame it on all the mothers and fathers of the world, they of the lessons, the pellets of power, they of the love surrounding you like batter ... Blame it on God perhaps? He of the first opening that pushed us all into our first mistakes? No, I'll blame it on Man For Man is God and man is eating the earth up like a candy bar and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean for it is known he will gulp it all down. The stars (possibly) are safe. At least for the moment. The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death. — Anne Sexton

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at. — Anne Sexton

To die whole,
riddled with nothing
but desire for it,
is like breakfast
after love. — Anne Sexton

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. — Anne Sexton

I've grown tired of love
You are the trouble with me
I watch you walk right by — Anne Sexton

Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reigning them in like a circus hand ... — Anne Sexton

Please, when I come home, don't forget the "soul" ... and I don't mean "sweet sayings" ... I mean the truth, the sharing of our inmost thoughts, good or bad ... lost or comforting. That is the soul. I think it. The soul, is I think, a human being who speaks with the pressure of death at his head. That's how I'd phrase it. The self in trouble ... not just the self without love (as us) but the self as it will always be (with gun at its head finally) ... To live and know it is only for a moment ... that is to know "the soul" ... and it increases closeness and despair and happiness ... — Anne Sexton

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it. — Anne Sexton

Despair

Who is he?
A railroad track toward hell?
Breaking like a stick of furniture?
The hope that suddenly overflows the cesspool?
The love that goes down the drain like spit?
The love that said forever, forever
and then runs you over like a truck?
Are you a prayer that floats into a radio advertisement?
Despair,
I don't like you very well.
You don't suit my clothes or my cigarettes.
Why do you locate here
as large as a tank,
aiming at one half of a lifetime?
Couldn't you just go float into a tree
instead of locating here at my roots,
forcing me out of the life I've led
when it's been my belly so long?

All right!
I'll take you along on the trip
where for so many years
my arms have been speechless — Anne Sexton

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth. — Anne Sexton

You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong. — Anne Sexton