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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

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
Stars
Rats
World
Greedy
Poems
Tongue
Mercy
Star
Poet
Pottage
Poetry
Wrangle

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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
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being sixteen in the pants I died full of questions
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Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
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I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
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In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
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Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
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Let the light be called Day so that men may grow corn or take busses.
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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.
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Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
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Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
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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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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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Mood can be as important as sense.
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The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
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