Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
Interpretation
The quote warns about the limitations of intellectual knowledge, suggesting that it can lead to confusion and emotional disconnect.
Anne Sexton's quote reflects on the paradox of intellect, where an overabundance of knowledge can create a disconnection from genuine understanding and emotional depth. It suggests that while intellect can provide a sense of superiority, it may ultimately leave individuals feeling lost or emotionally unfulfilled, emphasizing the importance of balance between intellect and heartfelt wisdom.
In practice
In a discussion on philosophy, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence alongside intellectual pursuits.
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...
If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.
Behaving like a princess is work. It's not just about looking beautiful or wearing a crown. It's more about how you are inside.
When you have known the kiss of a flaying knife, a laugh loses all its power to hurt you.
Do not worry about your career. Concern yourself with your vocation, and that is to be lovers of Jesus.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.
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