Anne Sexton Quotes

There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called 'libraries'

Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head?

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.

Love can be a huge mountain, a gentle garden, a raging storm, a cool breeze, or a perfect bath. But there is always fire somewhere nearby. There is always the red-hot stuff of the soul's initiation. If there isn't fire, then it isn't love ... If it doesn't insist that you move to your next level, if it doesn't take your heart and make it explode in a million pieces, only to fall back together again in some Moment of enlightened understanding, then you haven't really loved.

If there is no love in your heart - so sorry, Then there is no hope for you - true, true

Intellect, without heart, is infinitely cruel. . . .

Love is wiser than wisdom.

It is by love alone that we understand anything

I have always suspected that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. It is a boon to people who don't have deep feelings; their pleasure comes from what they know. . . . But this only emphasizes the difference between the artist and the scholar.

The intellect, divine as it is, and all worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcasses, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

We're asleep until we love.

Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.

A little knowledge can go a long way.

My job is to help you fall in love.

You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn't the same as being in love

If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?

Intellect is a part of a good faith. Intellect is the light, the heart is the direction.

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First, to let go of life. In the end, to take a step without feet; to regard this world as invisible, and to disregard what appears to be the self. Heart, I said, what a gift it has been to enter this circle of lovers, to see beyond seeing itself, to reach and feel within the breast.

Purity of heart is love for the weak who constantly fall.

If I knew that, I'd fall in love over and over again. Hearts aren't supposed to be mended. If you fall in love and it doesn't work out, you get a broken heart. What comes out of that will make you a better lover and partner next time.

I haven't ever really found a place that I call homeI never stick around quite long enough to make itI apologize that once again I'm not in loveBut it's not as if I mindthat your heart ain't exactly breaking.

I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.