01c. 1951 ADCourageIt is in the small things we see it.The child's first step,as awesome as an earthquake.The first time you rode a bike,wallowing up the sidewalk.The first spanking when your heartwent on a journey all alone.When they called you crybabyor poor or fatty or crazyand made you into an alien,you drank their acidand concealed it.Later,if you faced the death of bombs and bulletsyou did not do it with a banner,you did it with only a hat tocover your heart.You did not fondle the weakness inside youthough it was there.Your courage was a small coalthat you kept swallowing.If your buddy saved youand died himself in so doing,then his courage was not courage,it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
02c. 1951 ADTaking into consideration all your lovelinesswhy can't you burn your bootsoles and yourdraft card? How can you sit there saying yesto war? You'll be a pauper when you die, soreboy. Dead, while I still live at our addresss.Oh my brother, why do you keep making planswhen I am at seizures of hearts and hands?Come dance the dance, the Papa-Mama dance;bring costumes from the suitcase pasted Ille de France, the S.S. Gripsholm. Papa's London Harness case he took abroad and kept i our attic laced with old leather straps for storage and hisscholar's robes, black licorice - that metamorphosiswith it's crimson blood. "The Papa and Mama DanceAnne Sexton / quote ↗
03c. 1951 ADWe were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
04c. 1951 ADDepression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
05c. 1951 ADexI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
06c. 1951 ADGod 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 ↗
07c. 1951 ADI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
08c. 1951 ADI find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
09c. 1951 ADBut suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
10c. 1951 ADGive me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
13c. 1951 ADI like you; your eyes are full of language."[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]Anne Sexton / quote ↗
15c. 1951 ADQuite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headI'm undergoing open-heart surgery.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
17c. 1951 ADHe turns the key.Presto!It opens this book of odd taleswhich transform the Brothers Grimm.Transform?As if an enlarged paper clipcould be a piece of sculpture.(And it could.)Anne Sexton / quote ↗
18c. 1951 ADEach night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That's another kind of prison.It's not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon melike some sleeping jellyfish.What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help -this life after death?Anne Sexton / quote ↗
19c. 1951 ADSometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
21c. 1951 ADIt doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.Anne Sexton / quote ↗
