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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
Need
Needs
Believe
Quite
Belief
Reality

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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
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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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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Anne Sexton
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My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
Anne Sexton
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton
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A woman who writes feels too much.
Anne Sexton
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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
Anne Sexton
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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
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There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.
Anne Sexton
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
Anne Sexton
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If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.
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 am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
Anne Sexton
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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
Anne Sexton
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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
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The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
Anne Sexton
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It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
Anne Sexton
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Somebody who should have been born is gone.
Anne Sexton
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God is only mocked by believers.
Anne Sexton
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton