I’d won the world but like forsaken explorer, I’d lost my map.

— Anne Sexton

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

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadpan’s float.

— Anne Sexton

I like you; your eyes are full of language."[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]

— Anne Sexton

It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.

— Anne Sexton

It is snowing and death bugs mean stubborn as insomnia.

— Anne Sexton

Live or die, but don't poison everything.

— Anne Sexton

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been harbor a long time --it has a hell of a lotto do with Holland suspicion of the eye and the religious object sand how I mourned them when they were made obscenely my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredients mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as IFI were a sawed-off Bodmin the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright ligand even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at youth shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watchyoucomedown with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize --and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yardlike celery stalk sand better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchins, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around stand cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on man little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes Anand you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! To destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians,3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord woodeachlike birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

— Anne Sexton

Love your self's self where it lives.

— Anne Sexton

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the tollgate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia, one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

— Anne Sexton