Anne Sexton Love Quotes and Sayings

Anne Sexton Love Quotes and Sayings

#1 The Fortress

1. I cannot promise very much.
I give you the images I know.
Lie still with me and watch…
We laugh and we touch.
I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

#2 The Expatriates

2. My dear, it was a moment
to clutch at for a moment
so that you may believe in it
and believing is the act of love, I think,
even in the telling, wherever it went.

#3 The Operation

3. …all who love have lied.

#4 To Like, To Love

4. We all walk softly away.
We would stay and be the nurse but
there are too many of us and we are too worried to help.
It is love that walks away
and yet we have terrible mouths
and soft milk hands.
We worry with like.
We walk away like love.

#5 Admonitions to A Special Person

5. To love another is something
like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

#6 Letter to W. D. Snodgrass, 1959

6. If so, I don’t care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.

#7 Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree

7. There is no one left who understands
how I wait
here in my wooden legs and O
my green green hands.

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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts – October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.
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Sayings by Anne Sexton

#1 The Poet’s Story, 1 January 1972 entry

1. It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

#2 Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound

2. Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.

#3 The Death Notebooks, 1974

3. Even without wars, life is dangerous.

#4 Old

4. Death starts like a dream,
full of objects and my sister’s laughter.
We are young and we are walking
and picking wild blueberries.
all the way to Damariscotta.
Oh Susan, she cried.
you’ve stained your new waist.
Sweet taste –
my mouth so full
and the sweet blue running out
all the way to Damariscotta.
What are you doing? Leave me alone!
Can’t you see I’m dreaming?
In a dream you are never eighty.

#5 The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, William Packard, Doubleday, 1974

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

#6 Live

6. Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

#7 The Dead Heart

7. The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.

#8 Letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 26 December 1962

8. There are a few great souls in my life. They are not many. They are few. You are one.

#9 Letter to W. D. Snodgrass, 1959, Anne Sexton: A Self-portrait in Letters

9. I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
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Unsourced Anne Sexton Quotes

1. I’ve grown tired of love. You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by.

2. As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

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