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Need is not quite belief.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Quite
Belief
Reality
Need
Needs
Believe

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
Anne Sexton
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Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
Anne Sexton
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
Anne Sexton
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At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.
Anne Sexton
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think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Anne Sexton
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I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.
Anne Sexton
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O starry night, This is how I want to die
Anne Sexton
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I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
Anne Sexton
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Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins.
Anne Sexton
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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne Sexton
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I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
Anne Sexton
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
Anne Sexton
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Anne Sexton
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Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
Anne Sexton
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I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
Anne Sexton
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Anne Sexton
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All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.
Anne Sexton
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And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
Anne Sexton
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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
Anne Sexton
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton