Anne Sexton

"We are all writing God's poem."

"Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane."

"Love your self's self where it lives. There is no special God to refer to; or if there is, why did I let you grow in another place. You did not know my voice when I came back to call. All the superlatives of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe will not help you know the holidays you had to miss."

"I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray."

"I imitate a memory of belief that I do not own."

"I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind."

"All who love have lied."

"Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet."

"Need is not quite belief."

"Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened."

"A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warm the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl."

"It would be pleasant to be drunk: faithless to my tongue and hands, giving up the boundaries for the heroic gin. Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool. I will try it shortly."

"And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone."

"In a dream you are never eighty."

"I was spread out daily and examined for flaws."

"I grow old on my bitterness."

"Love! That red disease —"

"Why have your eyes gone into their own room?"

"But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build."

"My mouth blooms like a cut. I've been wronged all year, tedious nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby crybaby, you fool!"

"I am alive when your fingers are."

"As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off."

"You said the anger would come back just as the love did."

"He puts his bones back on, Turning the clock back an hour. She knows flesh, that skin balloon, the unbound limbs, the boards, the roof, the removable roof. She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, when it is over he places her, like a phone, back on the hook."

"Catch me. I'm your disease."

"Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes."

"With a tongue like a razor he will kiss the mother, the child, and we three will color the stars black in memory of his mother who kept him chained to the food tree or turned him on and off like a water faucet and made women through all these hazy years the enemy with a heart of lies."

"In my sights I carve him like a sculptor. I mold out his last look at everyone. I carry his eyes and his brain bone at every position. I know his male sex and I do march over him with my index finger. His mouth and his anus are one. I am at the center of feeling."

"My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more."

"It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was."

"The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood."

"I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart."

"What can I do with this memory? Shake the bones out of it? Defoliate the smile? Stub out the chin with cigarettes? Take the face of the man I love and squeeze my foot into it, when all the while my heart is making a museum? I love you the way the oboe plays. I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel. I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes. Yet I fear you, as one in the desert fears the sun."

"I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss. I am pushing knives through the hands that created two into one. Our hands do not bleed at this, they lie still in their dishonor."

"I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face."

"There is rust in my mouth, the stain of an old kiss."

"Death, I need my little addiction to you. need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me."

"I begin again, Dr.Y, this neverland journal, full of my own sense of filth. Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?"

"God is only mocked by believers."

"Blue eyes wash off sometimes."

"Here in the hospital, I say, that is not my body, not my body. I am not here for the doctors to read like a recipe."

"We all walk softly away. We would stay and be the nurse but there are too many of us and we are too worried to help. It is love that walks away and yet we have terrible mouths and soft milk hands. We worry with like. We walk away like love."

"Earth, earth riding your merry-go-round toward extinction, right to the roots thickening the oceans like gravy, festering in your caves, you are becoming a latrine."

"To love another is something like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief."

"I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin."