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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

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
Persons
Person
Writing
Think
Thinking
Understands
Loves
Reader
Perfect

More quotes by Anne Sexton

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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Anne Sexton
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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
Anne Sexton
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I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
Anne Sexton
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
Anne Sexton
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
Anne Sexton
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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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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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The fish are naked. The fish are always awake. They are the color of old spoons and caramels.
Anne Sexton
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Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.
Anne Sexton
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Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
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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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
Anne Sexton
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The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Anne Sexton
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I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.
Anne Sexton
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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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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When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing.
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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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
Anne Sexton
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton