Anne Sexton Poetry Quotations

This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Poetry to me is prayer ...

I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.

Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.

Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.