And what of the dead? They lie without shoe sin the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. Furthermore, they refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knuckle bone.

— Anne Sexton

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. A that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives. . . Locked outside 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. Furthermore, I'm not a part. Furthermore, I'm not a member. Furthermore, I'm frozen.

— Anne Sexton

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

— Anne Sexton

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.

— Anne Sexton

Clover['s] eyes are full of language.

— Anne Sexton

Courage It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk. The first spanking when your heart went on a journey all alone. When they called you crybaby or poor or fatty or crazy and made you into an alien, you drank their acid and concealed it. Later, if you faced the death of bombs and bullets you did not do it with a banner, you did it with only a hat to cover your heart. You did not fondle the weakness inside you though it was there. Your courage was a small coal that you kept swallowing. If your buddy saved you and died himself in so doing, then his courage was not courage, it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

— Anne Sexton

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

— Anne Sexton

Death's in the goodbye.

— Anne Sexton

Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.

— Anne Sexton

Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between sand 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.

— Anne Sexton