Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the importance of discussing emotions like sadness, both in personal reflection and shared dialogue.
Anne Sexton emphasizes the need for open discussions about sadness, suggesting that while it is often a solitary struggle, sharing it with others can provide a sense of relief and connection. She acknowledges her own tendency to dwell on sadness but also expresses a desire for others to engage in these conversations, highlighting the communal aspect of emotional experiences.
In practice
In a therapy session to highlight the importance of discussing feelings.
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...
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.
In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.
In short, all things that please the natural man in this world, are, to a true Christian, only so many crosses and temptations, allurements of sin and snares of death, that continually exercise his virtue.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.