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

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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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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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
Anne Sexton
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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
Anne Sexton
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To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.
Anne Sexton
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Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
Anne Sexton
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Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
Anne Sexton
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Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
Anne Sexton
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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
Anne Sexton
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I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
Anne Sexton
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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Anne Sexton
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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Anne Sexton
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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
Anne Sexton
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Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
Anne Sexton
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Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.
Anne Sexton
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I am younger each year at the first snow.
Anne Sexton
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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
Anne Sexton
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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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Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
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The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.
Anne Sexton
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Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
Anne Sexton