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this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.

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
People
Alibis
Street
Lifetime
Entire
Loss
Streets
Dream
Life
Oily

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
Anne Sexton
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
Anne Sexton
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
Anne Sexton
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Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
Anne Sexton
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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.
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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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.
Anne Sexton
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Anne Sexton
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Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
Anne Sexton
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The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
Anne Sexton
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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...
Anne Sexton
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
Anne Sexton
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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.
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!
Anne Sexton
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I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
Anne Sexton
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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. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is the waves fold over each other they are in love with themselves sleeping in their own skin and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.
Anne Sexton
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
Anne Sexton
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I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.
Anne Sexton