For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a struggle with limitations in communication and understanding, contrasting the internal experience with the external world.
In this quote, Anne Sexton expresses a sense of isolation and helplessness stemming from her inability to read or speak, which emphasizes the challenges faced during her long, contemplative nights. The imagery of the moon and the lights of cars represents the unchanging nature of the world around her, highlighting a yearning for connection and clarity while trapped in solitude and silence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal obstacles.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
All young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.
There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.
This is where I started life. This is where I went to uni. This is where the people I know are. This is my country, and when I put on my Great Britain vest, I'm proud, very proud, that it's my country.
I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.
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