I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the painful betrayal of someone who fails to keep their promises.
Anne Sexton's quote vividly conveys the sense of disappointment and anger that arises when trust is broken in a relationship. It suggests that promises meant to be uplifting or reassuring can turn into sources of pain when they are not honored, reflecting the darker side of human interactions and the emotional aftermath of broken commitments.
In practice
During a discussion about the importance of keeping commitments in relationships.
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 pour oil and vinegar into the same vessel, you would call them not friends but opponents.
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.
Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
The worst thing you can do for anyone you care about is anything that they can do on their own.
Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.
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