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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
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My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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.
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... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.
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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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And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
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Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.
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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
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As a writer one has to take the chance on being a fool.
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Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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