Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the complex relationship between death and life, revealing a longing for the inevitability of death in the context of existence.
Anne Sexton's quote explores the intimate connection between life and death, articulating a desire for the presence of mortality within the experience of living. It suggests that the acceptance of death can bring a deeper understanding of life, as she personifies death as an addiction or a vital element necessary for her full existence. This tension between being fully alive and the allure of death highlights a profound existential contemplation.
In practice
In a poetry reading discussing the themes of life and death.
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...
One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.
What you see is evidence of what you believe.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.
I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions.
You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive components, step by step, over a period of time.
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