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All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.

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
Strangling
World

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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We are all writing God's poem.
Anne Sexton
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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
Anne Sexton
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Even without wars, life is dangerous.
Anne Sexton
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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
Anne Sexton
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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
Anne Sexton
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Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
Anne Sexton
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I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
Anne Sexton
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There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Anne Sexton
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women are born twice.
Anne Sexton
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Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
Anne Sexton
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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.
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
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...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.
Anne Sexton
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I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
Anne Sexton
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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton