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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.

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
Drawing
Blood
Without
Knife
Like
Kills
Knives
Sharp
Chinese
Tongue

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I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
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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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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.
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It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
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I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
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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.
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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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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Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
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What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
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To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.
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