My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
Interpretation
This quote metaphorically highlights the experience of death and identity, expressing the intertwining of life and death through vivid imagery.
Anne Sexton’s quote reflects on the inevitability of death and the personal connections we carry with us, represented by the name tags. The imagery of blood worn like a corsage emphasizes the beauty and tragedy of mortality, illustrating how our identities are marked by both life and the approach of death. Through this poignant expression, Sexton captures the complexity of human existence and the duality of celebrating life while acknowledging its ephemeral nature.
In practice
This poignant quote could be shared during a memorial service to reflect on the lives of those who have passed.
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...
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.
Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys... Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at grandma's house... and a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn't stay awake for both.
I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good, and against some greatly scorned evil.
Be a half-assed crusader, a part-time fanatic. Don't worry to much about the fate of the world. Saving the world is only a hobby. Get out there and enjoy the world, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, husbands wives; climb mountains, run rivers, get drunk, do whatever you want to do while you can, before it's too late.
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune
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