Anne Sexton

“Need is not quite belief.”

“Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.”

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”

“I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.”

“It is snowing and death bugs meas stubborn as insomnia.”

“The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives”

“I am God, la de dah.”

“I like you; your eyes are full of language."[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]”

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”

“I said to my doctor at the beginning, 'I'm no good; I can't do anything. I'm dumb.' He suggested I try educating myself by listening to Boston's educational TV station. He said I had a perfectly good mind.”

“My mother was top billing in our house.”

“Until I was twenty-eight, I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths.”

“exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.”

“Taking into consideration all your lovelinesswhy can't you burn your bootsoles and yourdraft card? How can you sit there saying yesto war? You'll be a pauper when you die, soreboy. Dead, while I still live at our addresss.Oh my brother, why do you keep making planswhen I am at seizures of hearts and hands?Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ille de France, the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa's London Harness case he took abroad and kept i our attic laced with old leather straps for storage and hisscholar's robes, black licorice - that metamorphosiswith it's crimson blood. "The Papa and Mama Dance”

“Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.”

“We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.”

“In a dream you are never eighty.”

“God owns heaven but He craves the earth.”

“The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.”

“Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.”