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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.

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
Like
Magic
Eaten
Simply
Craft
Special
Possessed
Enemy
Crafts
Asks
Twice
Carpenters
Taken
Suicide
Suicides
Language
Tools
Carpenter
Never
Build
Declared

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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
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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.
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I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
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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.
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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.
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I burn the way money burns.
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All who love have lied.
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I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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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.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
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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.
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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.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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In a dream you are never eighty.
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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.
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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
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