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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
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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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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
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Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.
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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
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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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No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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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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Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
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The man inside of woman ties a knot so that they will never again be separate.
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In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
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My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
Anne Sexton
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
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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.
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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
Anne Sexton