Anne Sexton Quotes

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

George Foreman. A miracle. A mystery to myself. Who am I? The mirror says back. The George you was always meant to be. Wasn't always like that. Used to look in the mirror and cried a river.

You have to know who you are, if you don't you have nightmares.

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

Pippin chooses love and finds a greater sense of himself at the end of all the madness. I relate to him in many ways. I have been through stuff, thought I knew best, and often been proven wrong.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by and obsessed with. My true self.

One day I actually took the list into the bathroom and I put it up against my face and looked in the mirror and I realized I had one of two choices, change the list or change myself.

I think that most of us can identify with the change that happens to Bruce Banner. We all have a little of both inside us. I think this is an important theme in defining the character.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

I don't know how happy I was when I met Sting. I always had this difficulty of not really knowing who I was.

Many times I looked in the mirror and didn't see anything. Couldn't see anything. I didn't see anything in the mirror. It was me, but I didn't truly know my soul, my spirit.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose... I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

I have never known a greater miracle, or monster, than myself.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.