Quote

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.

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
Spring
Discontent
Inspirational
Clown
Order
Witch
Ideas
Nurse
Play
Curse
Things
Radical
Awful
Criticism
Carpenter

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.
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Need is not quite belief.
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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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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
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There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.
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I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
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you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.
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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.
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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.
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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.
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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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Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
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It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.
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I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.
Anne Sexton
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The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
Anne Sexton
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
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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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She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
Anne Sexton
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I burn the way money burns.
Anne Sexton
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My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
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