As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
Interpretation
Love, like a cough, is something that can't be hidden, no matter how small.
This quote by Anne Sexton suggests that love is an emotion that is inherently visible and cannot be fully suppressed or concealed, just as a simple cough will reveal itself despite attempts to hide it. It highlights the inevitable nature of genuine feelings, emphasizing that when it comes to love, even the smallest emotional expression will eventually surface.
In practice
Using this quote during a toast at a wedding to emphasize the importance of expressing love openly.
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...
He felt all the torment of his and her position, all the difficulties they were surrounded by in consequence of their station in life, which exposed them to the eyes of the whole world, obliged them to hide their love, to lie and deceive, and again to lie and deceive, to scheme and constantly think about others while the passion that bound them was so strong that they both forgot everything but their love.
The person who does not decide to love forever will find it very difficult to really love for even one day.
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
grow old with me. the best is yet to be. the last of life for which the first was made.
Love is simply the name for the desire and the pursuit of the whole.
Whatever our religion, we know that if we really want to love, we must first learn to forgive before anything else.
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