Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that both saints and poets experience life with intensity and passion rather than restraint.
Anne Sexton's quote implies that true creativity and spiritual expression require a full embrace of emotions and experiences. Saints, representing spiritual ideals, and poets, symbolizing artistic expression, both reject moderation in favor of a vibrant, exuberant approach to life. Their work and actions are marked by fervor and a deep connection to their inner feelings, highlighting the importance of passion in both faith and art.
In practice
In a speech about creativity, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for artists to embrace their emotions fully.
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've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.
I still consider myself to be introverted, but everyone has a side of themselves that is amplified. Performers have to learn to tap into that, even if it's not natural.
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.
Making movies is not rocket science. It's about relationships and communication and strangers coming together to see if they can get along harmoniously, productively, and creatively. That's a challenge. When it works, it's fantastic and will lift you up. When it doesn't work, it's almost just as fascinating.
Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.
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