Anne Sexton Quotes

We all have our inner demons.

You go through spells where you feel that maybe you're too sensitive for this world. I certainly felt that.

I've spent a lot of time and money trying to keep my anger in control.

Issues deals with the issues I had, the fears I had and it isn't a 'nice' album but fears and depressions are not particularly nice.

Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.

It would be impossible to estimate how much time and energy we invest in trying to fix, change and deny our emotions - especially the ones that shake us at our very core, like hurt, jealousy, loneliness, shame, rage and grief.

I think there comes a time in every persons life where they just need to go to the darkest, most dismal place.

I have my moments. Ever since I was a boy, I never was someone who was at ease with happiness. Too often I embrace introspection and self-doubt. I wish I could embrace the good things.

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.

My comfort wasn't the most important thing - my getting through to the other side of difficult feelings was. However long it might seem to take, and however unfair it might seem, it was my job to do it.

I'm good at playing the emotionally strangled person. The woman who is in the worst place in her life. That's me!

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They're metaphors for the human condition.

I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.

Everyone has their moments of solitude, difficulties, and vulnerability.

You talk about crying! The spring of 1988, I spent a fair length of time trying to come to grips with who I was and the habits I had and what they did to people that I truly loved. I really spent a period of time where, I suspect, I cried three or four times a week.

You simply have to accept that your demons are a part of you.

Lots of songs aren't even from my experiences, but they're about accepting... the dark things about yourself.

That is the thing that I was scared of - that I would know intellectually that there's something to glean out of life, but that I would be so broken that I wouldn't care.

The pain is always bringing me a lesson. If I listen to the lesson when the pain is manageable, the pain won't get gargantuan and flatten me entirely, because I will have received the message at the center. I receive it as gently as I can, because the cruelest thing that I do to myself is try to push myself through an experience.

I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don't think that's only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.

It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.

I am subject to very powerful lows. When you have highs, you have terrible lows. When you pinpoint that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, it is very frightening.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.