Quotes by Anne Sexton

“Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.”

“Pain engraves a deeper memory.”

“He turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)”

“Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.”

“Death's in the good-bye.”

“Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That's another kind of prison.It's not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, m...”

“Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.”

“Love your self's self where it lives.”

“It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was. ”

“Do you like me?”No answer.Silence bounced, fell off his tongueand sat between usand clogged my throat.It slaughtered my trust.It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.We exchanged blind words,and I did n...”

“That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow”

“Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.”

“I am, to be sure, afraid that if you knew me that you wouldn’t love me. But this must be faced…I fear it in any relationship. Thus I am perhaps afraid to reveal facts about things…or to say too muc...”

“I’d won the worldbut like aforsaken explorer,I’d lostmy map.”

“Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.”

“Quite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headI'm undergoing open-heart surgery.”

“Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.”

“Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That's another kind of prison.It's not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, m...”

“It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.”

“We are all writing God's poem.”