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The body is a damn hard thing to kill.

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
Suicidal
Damn
Kill
Body
Hard
Thing

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
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Love your self's self where it lives.
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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
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When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
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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.
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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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I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.
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Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?
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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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I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.
Anne Sexton
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The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
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The sanest thing in this world is love.
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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Anne Sexton
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[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.
Anne Sexton
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When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
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I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
Anne Sexton
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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