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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.

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
Instructions
Instruction
Boring
Poet
Secret
Whatever

More quotes by 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.
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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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In a dream you are never eighty.
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Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
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And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
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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.
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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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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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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.
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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
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What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.
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I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
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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.
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My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
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I am younger each year at the first snow.
Anne Sexton