Quote

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

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
Beautiful
Ends
Diary
Certain
Diaries
Mind
Narrow
Something
Worth
Learning
Sense
Order

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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I burn the way money burns.
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
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Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
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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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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
Anne Sexton
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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
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I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
Anne Sexton
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Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
Anne Sexton
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All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.
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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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 ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
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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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.
Anne Sexton
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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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