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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

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
Words
Business
Better
Swarming
Like
Coins
Bees
Labels
Poet
Poetry

More quotes by 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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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
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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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
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.
Anne Sexton
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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
Anne Sexton
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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
Anne Sexton
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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
Anne Sexton
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I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
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think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Anne Sexton
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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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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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I grow old on my bitterness.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
Anne Sexton
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When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.
Anne Sexton
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What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
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 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