Anne Sexton Transformations Quotes

And I. I too. Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

She married the prince and all went well except for the fear — the fear of sleep. Briar Rose was an insomniac... She could not nap or lie in sleep without the court chemist mixing her some knock-out drops and never in the prince's presence.

If someone burns out your eye I will take your socket and use it for an ashtray.

I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.

Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots, into the hypnotist's trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues.

And then I knew that the voice of the spirits had been let in-- as intense as an epileptic aura-- and that no longer would I sing alone.

There once was a miller with a daughter as lovely as a grape. He told the king that she could spin gold out of common straw. The king summoned the girl and locked her in a room full of straw and told her to spin it into gold or she would die like a criminal. Poor grape with no one to pick. Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. (Rumpelstiltskin)

Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am. Daddy? That's another kind of prison. It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help - this life after death?

This one day her mother gave her a basket of wine and cake to take to her grandmother because she was ill. Wine and cake? Where's the aspirin? The penicillin? Where's the fruit juice? Peter Rabbit got camomile tea. But wine and cake it was.

Death, with one-eyed jack in his hand, makes a promise to the thirteenth child.

It is not enough to read Hesse and drink clam chowder, we must have the answers.

He turns the key. Presto! It opens this book of odd tales which transform the Brothers Grimm. Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip could be a piece of sculpture. (And it could.)

I grew, and then there were many strange apparitions, the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison and all of that.

the drunken poet (a genuis by daylight)

And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in and out like a gas jet.

Further, I must not dream for when I do I see the table set and a faltering crone at my place, her eyes burnt by cigarettes as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.

It was ordained. Just as the fates deal out the plague with a tarot card. Just as the Supreme Being drills holes in our skulls to let the Boston Symphony through.

Even in the pink crib the somehow deficient, the somehow maimed, are thought to have a special pipeline to the mystical, the faint smell of the occult, a large ear on the God-horn.

and only as she dreamt of the yellow hair did moonlight sift into her mouth.