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...
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the internal struggles and dualities within oneself that can affect our ambitions and dreams.
Anne Sexton's quote speaks to the complex nature of human identity and the internal conflicts we face. The 'dwarf' symbolizes our insecurities or darker impulses, while the 'Doppelganger' represents a part of ourselves that we may suppress. This quote serves as a warning to acknowledge these inner battles and to recognize that they can influence our actions and dreams.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal obstacles, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of facing inner demons.
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.
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.
What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool!
Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Whiteness in a racist, corporate-controlled society is like having the image of an American Express Cardstamped on one's face: immediately you are “universally accepted.”
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
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