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...
Though the universe is delightfully complex, life, at its heart, is not particularly complicated. Live true to who you are and though it won't always be easy, you'll live well.
I want to go everywhere, look at and listen to everything. You can go crazy with some of the wonderful stuff there is in life.
Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Because I've been so blessed with a background in nursing and spent so much time with patients at a really intimate, vulnerable time in their lives, the one lesson I've learned is that you never turn down a challenge where you can keep your creative integrity and your heart and soul and your sense of self.
Live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much.
We were poor, but we didn't know it. There were no government bureaus in those days presuming to determine where poorness begins and ends, but I don't remember ever being hungry.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.