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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the pain and confusion that arises from unreciprocated feelings of affection, highlighting the emotional turmoil it can cause.
In this quote, Anne Sexton captures the intense emotional experience of longing and disappointment within a relationship. The silence that follows a vulnerable question creates a profound sense of rejection, resulting in feelings of isolation and loss. The imagery evokes the transformation of hope into despair, illustrating how the absence of affirmation can suffocate one's spirit, leading to an inward turmoil that is both consuming and disheartening.
In practice
In a discussion about heartbreak, one might use this quote to illustrate the feelings associated with unrequited love.
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.
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...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
Isn't it sad that really the only times I feel seen as an American are when I'm abroad? I'm not saying racism doesn't exist outside of the United States. What I am saying is that the rest of the world can see that I'm American. Why is it so hard for so many White Americans?
I thought that by saying no and explaining my reasons my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks, he continued to ask me out on several occasions
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
Anything that takes you out of the context of being separate is healing. Anything that takes you out of the context of separateness is intimacy.
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
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