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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
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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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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
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Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
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It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
Anne Sexton
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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.
Anne Sexton
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
Anne Sexton
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
Anne Sexton
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Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.
Anne Sexton
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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
Anne Sexton
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
Anne Sexton
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Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
Anne Sexton
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Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
Anne Sexton