I am not a person to say the words out loud
I think them strongly, or let them hunger from the page:
know it from there, from my silence, from somewhere other
than my tongue
the quiet love
the silent rage.
— Against the Small Evil Voices
Words bother me. I think it is why I am a poet. I keep trying to force myself to speak of the things that remain mute inside. My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable. To make an object out of the chaos…To say what? a final cry into the void.
— Anne Sexton, from a letter to Dennis Farrell, August 2, 1963
