Quote

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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
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.
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Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
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Need is not quite belief.
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The day of fire is coming, the thrush will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.
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the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
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.
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If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.
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What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.
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Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.
Anne Sexton
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
Anne Sexton
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.
Anne Sexton
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
Anne Sexton
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
Anne Sexton
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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
Anne Sexton
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There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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A woman who writes feels too much.
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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