#anne sexton

writemeanna:

“I existed to mean something to you, to matter to you and then to belong to you.”

— Anne Sexton, from a unsent letter to Mary Gray Harvey, featured in “Anne Sexton: A Biography,” written by Diane Wood Middlebrook

writemeanna:

“…to be loved / and found magical, / like a secret…”

—Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “The Fury of Flowers and Worms,”

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”

— Oscar Wilde

.. how the moon flows through her and in between.

~Anne Sexton

mitskey:

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of The Island/ Louisa May Alcott, Little Women/ Unknown/ John Keats, To The Ladies Who Saw Me Crowned/ Anne Sexton, Suicide Note: The Complete Poems/ Irish Murdoch, The Italian Girls/ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath/ Anne Sexton, The Truth the Dead Know/ Virginia Woolf, The Waves/ Pablo Neruda, One Hundred Sonnets

derangedrhythms:

I have signed a lease with god that says I’m never very well spiritually or mentally or whatever they call it.

Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters ⁠— Tillie Olsen, 14th February 1965

Submitted by https://11041714011.tumblr.com/

I could admit
that I am only a coward
crying me me me
and not mention the little gnats, the moths,
forced by circumstance
to suck on the electric bulb.
But surely you know that everyone has a death,
his own death,
waiting for him.
So I will go now
without old age or disease,
wildly but accurately,
knowing my best route,
carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years,
never asking, “Where are we going?”
We were riding (if I’d only known)
to this.

–Anne Sexton, from “Suicide Note“ written, June 1965, Live or Die, 1966

***

Today marks the 45th anniversary of Anne Sexton’s suicide! RIP!

(9 November 1928 – 4 October 1974)

And if the memory of these days is all I ever have, it will be worth it.

Anne Sexton said, “As for me, I am watercolor. I wash off.” and Emily Dickinson said, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” and Chuck Palahniuk said, “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character… Would you slow down? Or speed up?” and Vita Sackville-West said, “Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world.” and Clarice Lispector said, “For one has the right to shout. So, I am shouting.” and Chelsea Hodson said, “I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree- everyone is better as a theory.” and Charles Bukowski said, “We have come so far and gone nowhere. We have lived so long and hardly at all.” and Jose Saramago said, “And here I am, trapped between today and the future and with no hope in either of them.” and Virginia Woolf said, “Do you still believe in life by the way?” and I am thinking about how badly I want to feel like I take up space.

I have been thinking about when Charles Bukowski said, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” and when R.Y.S. Perez said, “People should love in the same way that they should write; insistently, fervently, forever.” and when they said, “I will show you all the ways in which you are easy to love.” and when Yves Olade said, “I wanted to talk about love. You wanted to become it.” and when Pablo Neruda said, “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” and when Clive Barker said, “Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.” and when Anne Sexton said, “I don’t care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.” and when Christopher Citro said, “I love you. I want us both to eat well.”

Ashe Vernon said, “You are a language I am no longer fluent in but still remember how to read.” and Anne Sexton said, “I like you; your eyes are full of language.” and Salma Deera said, “My love translated sounds like a dead language.” and Czesław Miłosz said, “Language is the only homeland.” and Alice Notely said, “I can’t translate myself into language anymore.” and Hishaam Siddiqi said “One day I woke up and we no longer spoke the same language. I haven’t heard from you since.” and Jane Austen said, “and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.” and Henry James said, “She is written in a foreign tongue.” and I am in awe of language.