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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.

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
Till
Bread
Stones
Bite
Bites
Stone

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
Anne Sexton
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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
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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.
Anne Sexton
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
Anne Sexton
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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
Anne Sexton
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Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.
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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I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.
Anne Sexton
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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 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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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
Anne Sexton
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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
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
Anne Sexton
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... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.
Anne Sexton