Anne Sexton Quotes

I never saw my mother happy with me and proud of me for doing something: She only knew me as being a wild kid running the streets, coming home with new clothes that she knew I didn't pay for. I never got a chance to talk to her or know about her. Professionally, it has no effect, but it's crushing emotionally and personally.

I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

I was a disaster child. I remember I make very often my mother cry.

When my dad divorced my mom it was kind of like him leaving me also.

My childhood was extreme.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers - of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.

I rememeber one time we were getting ready to go to South America and everything was packed up and in the car ready to go and I hid and I was crying because I really did not want to go, I wanted to play. I did not want to go.

I remember specifically, for me, as a kid growing up or as a young teenager, if I ever cried or got upset in front of anybody, I would be so humiliated.

My earliest childhood memories are just of me falling and getting injuries.

When I was a child, I never played with other children. I hated them.

My mother died when I was five, and all I did was sit and cry. I cried and cried and cried all day, until the neighbors went away.

I started writing letters home to my mother, saying that I wanted to come home, grandma won't let me sing.

I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic.

I don't really remember much before was eight, but I do remember that my dad brought me to drop me off at my grandmother's house, and he was a very emotional guy, but that was the first time I really saw him cry, cos I knew it killed him to have to give me up, but he knew I needed some family structure. That was the last time I'd see him or talk to him when he was sober for the next 10 years.

My parents didn't like me. For bathtub toys they gave me a blender and a transistor radio.

If - and it can be in a movie or in a department store - I hear someone arguing with their child, I break down and cry. Because it reflects how I was treated when I was little.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.

Kaye: You know what the sun looks like? Janet: No, What? Kaye: Like he slit his wrists in a bathtub and the blood is all over the water. Janet: That's gross, Kaye. Kaye: And the moon is just watching. She's just watching him die. She must have driven him to it.

You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?

My mother's in my life, but at the time you imagine your mom passing away, not being there ... as a kid you try to think of something that hurts you the most ... It was just a tool [in "Hardball"].

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Oh! I know this truth, if I know no other, That passionate Love is Pain's own mother.