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Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.

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
Way
Expressions
False
Letters
Expression
Instead
Wish
Really

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
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I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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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.
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And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Anne Sexton
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
Anne Sexton
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
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Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
Anne Sexton
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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.
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
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Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
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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
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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If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.
Anne Sexton