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The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

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
Backwards
Therapy
Trouble
Makes
Life

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
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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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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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Today life opened inside me like an egg.
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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Even without wars, life is dangerous.
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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.
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All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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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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I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
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I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.
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.
Anne Sexton