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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

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
Snakes
God
Wants
Without
Snake
Elephant
Swallow
Elephants

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I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.
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Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
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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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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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.
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Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
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I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
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Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
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Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.
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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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I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I burn the way money burns.
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