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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

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
Trick
Tricks
Words
Writing

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.
Anne Sexton
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The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.
Anne Sexton
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We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
Anne Sexton
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
Anne Sexton
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Anne Sexton
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I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
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The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.
Anne Sexton
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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
Anne Sexton
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Anne Sexton
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the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
Anne Sexton
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
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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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
Anne Sexton
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Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.
Anne Sexton