627 Quotes by Anne Sexton

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.

Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?

Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!

Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?

I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.

In a dream you are never eighty.