Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?
Interpretation
The quote expresses feelings of isolation and the complexities of one's thoughts and emotions.
In this quote, Anne Sexton reflects on the ideas of solitude and internal struggle. The metaphor of becoming a hermit suggests a retreat from the outside world, indicating a desire for peace or a need to protect oneself. The imagery of a crowded skull conveys the overwhelming nature of thoughts and emotions, implying that the speaker feels both burdened and selective about whom they allow into their life.
In practice
During a mental health awareness talk, one might use this quote to discuss the importance of recognizing one's need for solitude.
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...
When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore.
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.
Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.
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