627 Quotes by Anne Sexton

I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.

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.

The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins....

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket....

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.