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Anne Sexton
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“Oh, la la la, / this music swims back to me.”
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“In a dream you are never eighty.”
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“A woman is her mother. / That's the main thing.”
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“Fear / a motor, / pumps me around and around / until I fade slowly ...”
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“... suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”
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“... women are born twice.”
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“Oh, darling, let your body in, / let it tie you in, / in comfort.”
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“Everything here is yellow and green. / Listen to its throat, its earthskin, / the bone dry voices of the peepers / as they throb like advertisements.”
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“... even a notary would notarize our bed / as you knead me and I rise like bread.”
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“Beauty is a simple passion, / but, oh my friends, in the end / you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.”
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“A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young.”
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“I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.”
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“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
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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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“Even without wars / life is dangerous.”
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“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”
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“Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.”
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“Your courage was a small coal / that you kept swallowing.”
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“To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.”
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“Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.”
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“Words and eggs must be handled with care. / Once broken they are impossible / things to repair.”
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“The ground has on its clothes. / The trees poke out of sheets / and each branch wears the sock of God.”
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“Today God gives milk / and I have the pail.”
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“I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.”
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“God is not indifferent to your need. / You have a thousand prayers / but God has one.”
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“A shoe with legs, / a stone dropped from heaven ...”
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“I am still divorcing him, / adding up the crimes / Of how he came to me, / how he left me.”
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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.”
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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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“Mood can be as important as sense.”
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“The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is; the waves fold over each other; they are in love with themselves; sleeping in their own skin; and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.”
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“... sorrow is easier than guilt.”
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“I am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving; then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.”
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“... psychiatry is a dirty mirror ...”
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“Letters are false really — they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are ...”
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“I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.”
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“In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans ...”
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“... the trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards ...”
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“[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.”
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“... I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.”
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“I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.”
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“ Poetry to me is prayer ...”
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“The sanest thing in this world is love.”
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“Capri is like a beautiful mother. The water holds you up like a float and is so clear. Capri is the mother we never had, young, beautiful, exotic, accepting and loving arms.”
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“They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.”
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“I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us — or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem — a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer — it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.”
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“But my future is a secret. / It is as shy as a mole.”
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“Death sits with his key in my lock. / Not one day is taken for granted.”
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“Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains ...”
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“Perhaps I am no one. / True, I have a body / and I cannot escape from it. / I would like to fly out of my head, / but that is out of the question. / It is written on the table of destiny / that I am stuck here in this human form. / That being the case / I would like to call attention to my problem.”
Anne Sexton, U.S. poet
(1928 - 1974)
Full name: Anne Grey Harvey Sexton.