Anne Sexton

But each and every bottle you bought was a medicine or a poison depending on whether you managed to keep them full enough. The method was unstable. Unsustainable. To drink enough but not too much for a drunk was like asking the evangelical not to say the name Jesus.

Tommy Orange

There There

In the years since I’d given up drinking, I’d worried I’d grown dull. Yeah, sobriety was healthier—it made you more “present,” “alive,” “in touch with your feelings”—blah, blah—we all know the benefits—believe me, I don’t need to be convinced. But sometimes, when I was having one of those 4 a.m. existential crises when your eyes snap open in a panic and you start inventorying all the deficits of your life, I worried that by giving up booze, I’d forfeited the last of whatever had made me really interesting and edgy and effervescent.

Susan Jane Gilman

Donna Has Left the Building

My beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.

Charles Bukowski

Suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Anne Sexton

Wanting to Die (poem)

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

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