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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
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You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.
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Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
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There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
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Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.
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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
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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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I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
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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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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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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
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It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.
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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.
Anne Sexton
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We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
Anne Sexton
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Anne Sexton