Quote

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

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
Moon
Ceiling
Turn
Ceilings
Turns
Nights
Read
Lights
Speak
Cars
Night
Count
Light
Across
Long
Car

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton
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I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
Anne Sexton
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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Love your self's self where it lives.
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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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
Anne Sexton
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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
Anne Sexton
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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.
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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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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Today life opened inside me like an egg.
Anne Sexton
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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
Anne Sexton
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Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
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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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
Anne Sexton
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Anne Sexton
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Anne Sexton
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My mouth blooms like a cut.
Anne Sexton