627 Quotes by Anne Sexton

I have been cut in two.

I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs....

Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing....

Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.

My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.

In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.

The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

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.