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Everyone in me is a bird I am beating all my wings

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
Beating
Wings
Bird
Everyone

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
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Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
Anne Sexton
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Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far.
Anne Sexton
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I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.
Anne Sexton
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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
Anne Sexton
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Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Anne Sexton
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Anne Sexton
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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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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There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.
Anne Sexton
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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
Anne Sexton
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A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.
Anne Sexton
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I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
Anne Sexton
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The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
Anne Sexton
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
Anne Sexton
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Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.
Anne Sexton
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Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
Anne Sexton
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But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.
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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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
Anne Sexton