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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
Business
Better
Swarming
Like
Coins
Bees
Labels
Poet
Poetry
Words

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Mood can be as important as sense.
Anne Sexton
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Anne Sexton
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Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
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 think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
Anne Sexton
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My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
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You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, My need is more desperate! and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.
Anne Sexton
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All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.
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
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I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
Anne Sexton
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
Anne Sexton
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There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.
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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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
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Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.
Anne Sexton
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Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.
Anne Sexton
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I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.
Anne Sexton
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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
Anne Sexton