Anne Sexton Time Quotations

Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.

I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

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.

All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.