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...
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the internal struggles and dualities within oneself that can affect our ambitions and dreams.
Anne Sexton's quote speaks to the complex nature of human identity and the internal conflicts we face. The 'dwarf' symbolizes our insecurities or darker impulses, while the 'Doppelganger' represents a part of ourselves that we may suppress. This quote serves as a warning to acknowledge these inner battles and to recognize that they can influence our actions and dreams.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal obstacles, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of facing inner demons.
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.
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
I never regretted turning down anything, I never regretted losing a job because I always felt something else was out there.
The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.
The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
I am convinced that when a man sincerely searches for God with all his heart, God will reveal Himself in some way.
One's true worth as a human being is not a matter of outward appearance or title, but derives rather from the breadth of one's spirit. Everything comes down to faith and conviction. It is what is in one's heart, and the substance of one's actions that count.
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