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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.

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
Wants
Small
Age
Many
Men

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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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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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
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There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
Anne Sexton
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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.
Anne Sexton
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Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
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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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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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I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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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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Well, one gets out of bed and the planets don't always hiss or muck up the day, each day.
Anne Sexton
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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.
Anne Sexton
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Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
Anne Sexton
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton