Quote

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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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Snow
Smell
Songs
Shouts
Voice
Shocks
Song
Quietness
Speak
Smells
Traffic
Shock

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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
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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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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
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I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
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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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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.
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When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.
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For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
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