She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to deep personal connection and appreciation for someone as an embodiment of our dreams and desires.
Anne Sexton's quote suggests that the person being described is not only profoundly vulnerable ('naked') and unique ('singular'), but also represents the culmination of both the self and one's aspirations. The metaphor of climbing a monument indicates that there is a significant effort required to understand and reach this person, emphasizing their strength and solidity in the process.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one could use this quote to emphasize the strength of the couple's bond.
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...
I made a wish on this tree years ago," Marco says. "What did you wish for?" Bailey asks. Marco leans forward and whispers in Bailey's ear. "I wished for her.
Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised I'd throw the thought away. To put the world between us We parted stiff and dry: 'Farewell,' said you, 'forget me.' 'Fare well, I will,' said I. If e'er, where clover whitens The dead man's knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you Starts in the trefoiled grass, Halt by the headstone shading The heart you have not stirred, And say the lad that loved you Was one that kept his word.
I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.
And then we were kissing.....The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I rally like my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle.
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.
We outgrow love like other things and put it in a drawer, till it an antique fashion shows like costumes grandsires wore.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.