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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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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
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They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
Anne Sexton
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When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
Anne Sexton
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The snow has quietness in it no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.
Anne Sexton
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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.
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
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women are born twice.
Anne Sexton
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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Anne Sexton
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The body is a damn hard thing to kill.
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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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Anne Sexton
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton
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Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always waiting.
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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My mouth blooms like a cut.
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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Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
Anne Sexton
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She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
Anne Sexton
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Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
Anne Sexton
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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
Anne Sexton