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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

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
Poet
Poetry
Without
Heart
Imagery
Images

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
Anne Sexton
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After a disaster strikes, it can be very devastating and very challenging. You're going to need a lot of strength and energy, and the American Red Cross suggests you go for the high protein items.
Anne Sexton
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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
Anne Sexton
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
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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As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.
Anne Sexton
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In a dream you are never eighty.
Anne Sexton
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I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
Anne Sexton
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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
Anne Sexton
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Anne Sexton
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Anne Sexton
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Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.
Anne Sexton
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
Anne Sexton
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My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.
Anne Sexton
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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
Anne Sexton
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My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.
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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Today life opened inside me like an egg.
Anne Sexton