Anne Sexton Quotes

Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black.

Thank God we don't serve God with our feelings, otherwise I don't know where I would be. - Pray for me.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

My frustration has always been that I'm a Christian, but I don't buy into, never have bought into, the belief that Jesus and God are these men who just dictate that this is how you have to live your life or you are going to burn in hell.

Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort but I do not think they will find God.

It is a most unhappy state to be at a distance with God: man needs no greater infelicity than to be left to himself.

These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you, they would have not been at all.

No pen, no words, no image can express to you the loveliness of my only, only Lord Jesus.

How many people have you made homesick for God?

I grew up a faithful person. I never lost faith. I prayed every day all throughout my life. But at some point in life, my faith became fairly abstract. And I lost this belief that we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.

And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.

Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism. Reading the Bible means starting at "In the beginning..." and throwing it down with disgust at "...the grace of the lord Jesus be with all. Amen." I'm sure there are lots of religious people who've read the Bible from start to finish and kept their faith, but in my self-selected sample, all the people I know who have done that are atheists.

As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

If there were no way into God, I would not have lain in the grave of this body so long.

Jesus is the one who brings God to us and us to God.

Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.

Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new. Late have I loved you. You have called to me, and have called out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light and have put my blindness to flight! You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace.

I do think that many religious people have enormous doubts.

I don't have the faith now. I certainly believe in Jesus - you know, that he existed and he was a very nice man. And who can disagree with a simple philosophy of treat other people like you'd like to be treated yourself? It's absolutely - nothing I can disagree with that.

Are you there God? It's me, Margaret.

Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of the (angel's) garments, the waving robes of those whose faces see God.