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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
Language
Tools
Carpenter
Never
Build
Declared
Like
Magic
Eaten
Simply
Craft
Special
Possessed
Enemy
Crafts
Asks
Twice
Carpenters
Taken
Suicide
Suicides
More quotes by Anne Sexton
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.
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Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
Anne Sexton
My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
Anne Sexton
I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
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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.
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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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Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
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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.
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sorrow is easier than guilt.
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
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I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
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The snow has quietness in it no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.
Anne Sexton