Anne Sexton Quotes

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Anne Sexton

Profession : Poet

Birth : November 9, 1928

Death's in the good-bye.

Anne Sexton

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

Anne Sexton

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Anne Sexton

In a dream you are never eighty.

Anne Sexton

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

Anne Sexton

I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.

Anne Sexton

Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.

Anne Sexton

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 nightmares out.

Anne Sexton

The joy that isn't shared dies young.

Anne Sexton

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

Anne Sexton

God owns heaven but He craves the earth.

Anne Sexton

Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.

Anne Sexton

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.

Anne Sexton

I want to be a child and not a mother, and I feel guilty about this.

Anne Sexton

Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.

Anne Sexton

I said to my doctor at the beginning, 'I'm no good; I can't do anything. I'm dumb.' He suggested I try educating myself by listening to Boston's educational TV station. He said I had a perfectly good mind.

Anne Sexton

These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.

Anne Sexton

Before I was married, I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baking a potato.

Anne Sexton

I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.

Anne Sexton

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.

Anne Sexton