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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

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
Sometimes
Phony
Something
Insights
Think
Insight
Thinking
Mess
Like
Writers
Usually
Wise
Phonies
Live
Messes

More quotes by 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.
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The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
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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!
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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
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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Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
Anne Sexton
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Poetry to me is prayer.
Anne Sexton
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton
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Thief!- how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.
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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Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
Anne Sexton
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We are all writing God's poem.
Anne Sexton
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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
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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
Anne Sexton
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I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.
Anne Sexton
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
Anne Sexton
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Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.
Anne Sexton
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O starry night, This is how I want to die
Anne Sexton
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My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
Anne Sexton