Quote

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.

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
Tear
Seep
Cover
Mattress
Roots
Mattresses
Tears
Booth
Evil
Receiver
Must
Bury
Even
Telephone
Telephones

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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
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At six I lived in a graveyard full of dolls, avoiding myself, my body, the suspect in its grotesque house.
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The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
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Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside
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Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
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For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
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Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
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I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
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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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Even without wars, life is dangerous.
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
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women are born twice.
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