Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
Interpretation
This quote uses vivid imagery to convey contrasting beauty and heaviness of emotions or experiences.
Anne Sexton's quote employs rich and contrasting imagery to highlight the profound complexities of life and emotions. The use of colors and similes evokes not just beauty and richness, but also darker themes, suggesting that life is a blend of both enchanting moments and heavy burdens, akin to the contrasting elements represented by precious stones and nature's qualities.
In practice
In a poetry reading, this quote can illustrate the depth of human experience.
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...
What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?
I am involved in the architecture of space.
At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.
I want it to sound like an orange.
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