Anne Sexton Quotes

I've only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They're all I need, and the rest I can do without.

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

Man wants little, nor that little long.

Ego brings unnatural desires in you; it drives you crazy. Life is simple, but to be simple one has to be purposeless. Any goal, and you can't be simple. Any goal and you can't be herenow. Any goal and the desire will rock you. Any goal, and you are on the way, again moving - you cannot enjoy this moment, the grace of this moment, the benediction of herenow.

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.

When every blessed thing you have is made of silver, or of gold, you long for simple pewter.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

Buddha says: Life should be simple, not complex. Life should be based on needs, not on desires. Needs are perfectly okay: you need food, you need clothes, you need a shelter, you need love, you need relationship. Perfectly good, nothing wrong in it. Needs can be fulfilled; desires are basically unfulfillable. Desires create complexity. They create complexity because they can never be fulfilled. You go on and on working hard for them, and they remain unfulfilled, and you remain empty.

Blessed are the simple, for they shall have much peace.

I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.

We long for simplicity and ordinariness.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.

In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

All I'm about is just the pen.

It's actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

The last thing is simplicity. After having gone through all the difficulties, having played an endless number of notes, it is simplicity that matters, with all its charm. It is the final seal on Art. Anyone who strives for this to begin with will be disappointed. You cannot begin at the end.

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.