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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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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
Anne Sexton
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
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Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
Anne Sexton
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Somebody who should have been born is gone.
Anne Sexton
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All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!
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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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
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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The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face. in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.
Anne Sexton
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To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Anne Sexton
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
Anne Sexton
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
Anne Sexton
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No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
Anne Sexton
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
Anne Sexton
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I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
Anne Sexton
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
Anne Sexton
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne Sexton
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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
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Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
Anne Sexton
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women are born twice.
Anne Sexton