Anne Sexton Heart Quotations

I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.

I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.

There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.

Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.

It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious

When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.

I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.

Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have....

the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.

It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.

Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.

When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.

Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.

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

Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.