My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
Interpretation
This quote metaphorically highlights the experience of death and identity, expressing the intertwining of life and death through vivid imagery.
Anne Sexton’s quote reflects on the inevitability of death and the personal connections we carry with us, represented by the name tags. The imagery of blood worn like a corsage emphasizes the beauty and tragedy of mortality, illustrating how our identities are marked by both life and the approach of death. Through this poignant expression, Sexton captures the complexity of human existence and the duality of celebrating life while acknowledging its ephemeral nature.
In practice
This poignant quote could be shared during a memorial service to reflect on the lives of those who have passed.
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...
What will I be doing in twenty years' time? I'll be dead, darling! Are you crazy?
If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.
The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.
That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.
One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
Never fall out of love with life
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