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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
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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!
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My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.
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Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
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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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There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.
Anne Sexton
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Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
Anne Sexton
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And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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All who love have lied.
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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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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.
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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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I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
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Our checks are pale. Our wallets are invalids. Past due, past due, is what our bills are saying and yet we kiss in every corner, scuffing the dust and the cat. Love rises like bread as we go bust.
Anne Sexton
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And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
Anne Sexton
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I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
Anne Sexton
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My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
Anne Sexton
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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
Anne Sexton