Quote

I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.

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
Strength
Shy
Secret
Bridge
Future
Shelter
Need
Steel
Needs
Bombs
Mole
Heart
Resolve
Stoicism
Bridges
Moles
Build
Bomb

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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.
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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I've grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by
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You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.
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Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
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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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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
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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.
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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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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.
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You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
Anne Sexton
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In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
Anne Sexton
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The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Anne Sexton
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Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
Anne Sexton
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... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.
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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
Anne Sexton
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
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Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
Anne Sexton