In a dream you are never eighty.
Interpretation
Dreams transcend age and reality, illustrating the timeless nature of the mind.
This quote by Anne Sexton suggests that within the realm of dreams, one is not constrained by the physical limitations of aging. Dreams operate outside the bounds of reality, allowing individuals to experience life without the burdens of time, emphasizing the freedom and boundless possibilities of the imagination.
In practice
In a motivational speech about chasing one's dreams, one could quote Sexton to illustrate how age shouldn't limit aspirations.
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...
Our fortunes rise together, and they fall together. 'All men are brothers,' said the Analects. We have a collective responsibility-to bring about a more stable and more prosperous world, a world in which every person in every country can reach their full potential.
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
I’ve often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His wrath, but the display racks in Christian bookstores.
This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.
To be with God is really to be involved in some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.
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