Pepper McGowan > Pepper 's Quotes

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Next to music, beer was best.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“Please sell $10,000 worth of stock — we have decided to lead a mad and extravagant life.”
― Harry Crosby

“I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”
― Anne Sexton

“Live or die, but don't poison everything.”
― Anne Sexton

“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. [...] I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.”
― Anne Sexton

“Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“And tonight our skin, our bones,
that have survived our fathers,
will meet, delicate in the hold,
fastened together in an intricate lock.
Then one of us will shout,
"My need is more desperate!" and
I will eat you slowly with kisses
even though the killer in you
has gotten out.”
― Anne Sexton, Love Poems

“Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.”
― Anne Sexton

“When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.”
― Anne Sexton

“I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women"

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was—
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.”
― Anne Sexton

“I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“The snow has quietness in it; no songs,
no smells, no shouts or traffic.
When I speak
my own voice shocks me.”
― Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones

“I know that I have died before—once in November.”
― Anne Sexton

“Our bodies were trash.
We leave them on the shore.”
― Anne Sexton

“Somebody sees me, and I see myself through them. Then it’s all gone, the whole world falls apart.”
― Anne Sexton

“If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.”
― Anne Sexton

“How are you? How is your wonderful bathroom? How are the books you read and the things you think? Your dogs and their lives? The weather? Your feelings?”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“The summer has seized you,
as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw
lemons as large as your desk-side globe-
that miniature map of the world-
and I could mention, too,
the market stalls of mushrooms
and garlic bugs all engorged.
Or I even think of the orchard next door,
where the berries are done
and the apples are beginning to swell.
And once, with our first backyard,
I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans
we couldn’t eat.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.”
― Anne Sexton

“After Auschwitz"

Anger,
as black as a hook,
overtakes me.
Each day,
each Nazi
took, at 8: 00 A.M., a baby
and sauteed him for breakfast
in his frying pan.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and picks at the dirt under his fingernail.

Man is evil,
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
that should be burnt,
I say aloud.
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.

Man with his small pink toes,
with his miraculous fingers
is not a temple
but an outhouse,
I say aloud.
Let man never again raise his teacup.
Let man never again write a book.
Let man never again put on his shoe.
Let man never again raise his eyes,
on a soft July night.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
I say those things aloud.

I beg the Lord not to hear.”
― Anne Sexton

“If someone burns out your eye
I will take your socket
and use it for an ashtray.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
~ Falsely yours”
― Kinky Friedman

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert