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...
In all my years of counselling those near death, I've yet to hear anyone say they wish they had spent more time at the office
People think that their world will get smaller as they get older. My experience is just the opposite. Your senses become more acute. You start to blossom.
Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost.
Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.
Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny?
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.