Quote

It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.

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
Inside
Dead
Heart
Clam
Like
Clams
Agreeable
Closing
Stranger
Opening

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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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Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
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I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
Anne Sexton
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My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
Anne Sexton
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
Anne Sexton
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I grow old on my bitterness.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.
Anne Sexton
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The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.
Anne Sexton
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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
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There is rust in my mouth,the stain of an old kiss.
Anne Sexton
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Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
Anne Sexton
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It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
Anne Sexton
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I would like to think that no one would die anymore if we all believed in daisies but the worms know better, don't they? They slide into the ear of a corpse and listen to his great sigh.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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women are born twice.
Anne Sexton
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If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
Anne Sexton