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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.

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
Devil
Half
Girl
Fear
Hanging
Used
Electric
Suddenly
Shadow

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
Anne Sexton
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All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
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life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
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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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No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
Anne Sexton
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Mood can be as important as sense.
Anne Sexton
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... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.
Anne Sexton
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Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said?
Anne Sexton
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Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.
Anne Sexton
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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
Anne Sexton
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
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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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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Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.
Anne Sexton
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All who love have lied.
Anne Sexton
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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
Anne Sexton
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Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
Anne Sexton