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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
Desire
Desiring
Must
Visit
Lady
Longing
Luck
Poet
Poetry
Evil

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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In a dream you are never eighty.
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Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
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My mouth blooms like a cut.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
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the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
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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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There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Anne Sexton
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All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.
Anne Sexton
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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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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
Anne Sexton
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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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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