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I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

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
Locked
Wrong
House
Mind

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
Anne Sexton
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The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
Anne Sexton
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Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
Anne Sexton
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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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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
Anne Sexton
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Anne Sexton
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
Anne Sexton
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I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
Anne Sexton
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
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Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.
Anne Sexton
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It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Anne Sexton
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You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
Anne Sexton
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You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.
Anne Sexton
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The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.
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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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.
Anne Sexton