Quote

Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.

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
Woman
Typewriters
Moving
Rhyme
Women
Seed
Take
Seeds
Purging
Like
Grass
Drumming
Move
Rhymes
Talking
Planting
Words
Typewriter

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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I like you your eyes are full of language. [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
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What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.
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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
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Rats live on no evil star
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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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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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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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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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... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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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.
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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
Anne Sexton
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I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
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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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They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
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