Quote

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.

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
Important
Probably
Heart
Story
Going
Tell
Stories
Part
Firsts
Shore
Matter
Poem
First
Images

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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Watch out for love (unless it is true, and every part of you says yes including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won't be heard and none of your running will run.
Anne Sexton
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Letters are false really - they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are.
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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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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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.
Anne Sexton
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My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
Anne Sexton
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I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
Anne Sexton
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Death's in the good-bye.
Anne Sexton
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As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
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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I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
Anne Sexton
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
Anne Sexton
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the heart, this child of myself that resides in the flesh, this ultimate signature of the me, the start of my blindness and sleep, builds a death crèche.
Anne Sexton
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I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.
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.
Anne Sexton
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No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
Anne Sexton
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A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.
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.
Anne Sexton
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I have been cut in two.
Anne Sexton
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...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.
Anne Sexton