Anne Sexton Quotes

“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I 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.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“The rest of my room is book shelves. I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“This November there seems to be nothing to say.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I should be working and not writing you. But this is a missing you, where are you, hello and necessary for my soul.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“…madness is not hysteria. It can be very quiet…”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Please, when I come home, don't forget the "soul"... and I don't mean "sweet sayings"... I mean the truth, the sharing of our inmost thoughts, good or bad... lost or comforting. That is the soul. I think it. The soul, is I think, a human being who speaks with the pressure of death at his head. That's how I'd phrase it. The self in trouble... not just the self without love (as us) but the self as it will always be (with gun at its head finally)... To live and know it is only for a moment... that is to know "the soul"... and it increases closeness and despair and happiness...”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.” Anne Sexton, in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass (November 28, 1958)”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Probably I am a fool…most poets are fools…but for some reason I love faith, but have none.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“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.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“The trouble is that I am crazy and the room, ah, my own room drinks me.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“From Camus’ notebooks … “an intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Clover['s] eyes are full of language.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I want to sleep all day and night (i.e., not live but not quite die) …”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I am going to lose myself – or else, the chance is that poetry will save me.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I don’t know if I can go on spilling myself out to people—those strange strangers.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters