“Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
“God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun
became a latrine.
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
My body became a side of mutton
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
“If I could blame it on all
the mothers and fathers of the world,
they of the lessons, the pellets of power,
they of the love surrounding you like batter ...
Blame it on God perhaps?
He of the first opening
that pushed us all into our first mistakes?
No, I'll blame it on Man
For Man is God
and man is eating the earth up
like a candy bar
and not one of them can be left alone with the ocean
for it is known he will gulp it all down.
The stars (possibly) are safe.
At least for the moment.
The stars are pears
that no one can reach,
even for a wedding.
Perhaps for a death.”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
“The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
“and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
I wore rubies and bought tomatoes
and now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls
like a worried eyebal,
but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat insdie me,
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands
and embrace it”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
“For all you who are going,
and there are many who are climbing their pain,
many who will be painted out with a black ink
suddenly and before it is time,
for these many I say,
awkwardly, clumsily,
take off your life like trousers,
your shoes, your underwear,
then take off your flesh,
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God.”
― Anne Sexton, quote from The Awful Rowing Toward God
Anne Sexton
Born place: in Newton, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date November 9, 1928
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“honor and valor that's what good is”
― Soman Chainani, quote from A World Without Princes
“But we have seen how brightly light shines in the dark, how sweetly music fills the quiet. All these years you have known only shadow and silence, and we have so much to show you. To save you.
I am not worth saving.
We are all worth saving.
How can you know?
We cannot ever know, not truly.
But we have faith.”
― Amie Kaufman, quote from Their Fractured Light
“Sometimes I think you are doomed to happiness”
― David Leavitt, quote from The Lost Language of Cranes
“The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, quote from The Confessions of Max Tivoli
“Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.”
― Steven Millhauser, quote from Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
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