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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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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Poetry
Evil
Desire
Desiring
Must
Visit
Lady
Longing
Luck
Poet

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
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Need is not quite belief.
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I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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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.
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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.
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... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
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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.
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I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
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sorrow is easier than guilt.
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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton