Kelli Oh > Kelli's Quotes

“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”
― Robert Frost

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
― Robert Frost

“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”
― Robert Frost

“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”
― Robert Frost

“You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.”
― Robert Frost

“Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.”
― Robert Frost

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
― 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

“Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“I like you; your eyes are full of language."

[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]”
― Anne Sexton

“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
― Anne Sexton

“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”
― Anne Sexton

“the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate…”
― Anne Sexton

“Now I am going back
And I have ripped my hand
From your hand as I said I would
And I have made it this far ...”
― Anne Sexton

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

“I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.”
― Anne Sexton

“But I can't. Need is not quite belief.”
― Anne Sexton

“Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

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

“I am your dwarf.
I am the enemy within.
I am the boss of your dreams.
See. Your hand shakes.
It is not palsy or booze.
It is your Doppelganger
trying to get out.
Beware...Beware...”
― Anne Sexton

“You who have inhabited me
in the deepest and most broken place,
are going, going”
― Anne Sexton

“We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Need is not quite belief.”
― Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones

“Give me your skin
as sheer as a cobweb,
let me open it up
and listen in and scoop out the dark.”
― Anne Sexton, Transformations

“Maybe I am becoming a hermit,
opening the door for only
a few special animals?
Maybe my skull is too crowded
and it has no opening through which
to feed it soup?”
― Anne Sexton , The Awful Rowing Toward God

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

“My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!

Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see - Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!

Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.

My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.”
― Anne Sexton, Love Poems