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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.

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
Happy
Dirty
Plumber
Comes
Jokes
Sonnet
Every
Tools
Corpse
Time
Bird
Corpses
Wind
Birds
Turn
Joke
Turns
Depression
Happiness
Boat
Nana

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
Anne Sexton
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Anne Sexton
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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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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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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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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.
Anne Sexton
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Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
Anne Sexton
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
Anne Sexton
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
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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.
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All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it.
Anne Sexton
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.
Anne Sexton
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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne Sexton
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
Anne Sexton