Anne Sexton Quotes

Half the bloody world is going through a divorce; more than that are having children. All of us have parents who are dying or have died. It's just the life cycle.

When I got divorced, it was another culture shock. It was going from this world I had been into since the age of 16 to literally standing on the streets of New York in kind of shock.

Going through a divorce after twenty-five years of marriage was the most difficult time for me. It was challenging to reorient my life from being centered around family, a family home, and a long-term relationship.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

I'm really going to miss all the people in the front office, media relations, marketing, all the great people at the ball park. They were my family for a while, and that part really stings. But life does go on.

It's like when a guy gets a divorce from his wife. You part ways. That's what I did with The Beach Boys.

The past is a country from which we have all emigrated

I just want a ring. Bottom line.

It’s part of growing up, I suppose…you always have to leave something behind you.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune's changes, are every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls never come back again.

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could keep your little tribe together forever, I would. I do so want to be generous. But some stories sprout bright vines that tendril off beyond our sight, carrying the folk we love best with them, and if I knew how to accept that with grace, I would share the secret.

Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back. —Margaret

I don't think you can ever return, really.

You develop relationships with people, and suddenly a family of actors and crew that you became so close to are now not around anymore. I'm not too sad about it because I got to move on to something else, but it's sad the way these things turn out.

We part with tender relations stretching far behind us, that never can be exactly renewed, and with others dawning - yet before us.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

I can never be the hero now. You have to be young and all that stuff. I used to be the hero.

This was nonsense, he thought. The need of her was a physical thing, like the thirsty of a sailor becalmed for weeks on the sea. He'd felt the need before, often, often, in their years apart. But why now? She was safe; he knew where she was - was it only the exhaustion of the past weeks and days, or perhaps the weakness of creeping age that made his bones ache, as though she had in fact been torn from his body, as God had made Eve from Adam's rib?