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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
Kills
Like
Knives
Sharp
Chinese
Tongue
Drawing
Blood
Knife
Without

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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.
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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
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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.
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I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
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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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Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
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No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
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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
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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
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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 think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
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The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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