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Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
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
Knowledge
Falls
Fall
Leaves
Nothing
Mouth
Heart
Intellect
Much
Mouths
Love
Watches
Mouthing
Poetry
Upside
Watch
Hanging
More quotes by Anne Sexton
The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton
Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton
I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton
My mouth blooms like a cut.
Anne Sexton
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
Anne Sexton
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
Today life opened inside me like an egg.
Anne Sexton
we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
Anne Sexton
Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
Anne Sexton
When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
Anne Sexton
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Anne Sexton
I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
Anne Sexton
For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
Anne Sexton
For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
Anne Sexton
Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
Anne Sexton
I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
Anne Sexton
I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
Anne Sexton
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
My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
Anne Sexton
