Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Interpretation
Love is a spontaneous and immersive experience that cannot be controlled or planned.
In this quote, Anne Sexton likens love to a wave that envelops you, suggesting that it requires complete surrender and openness. She emphasizes that love is akin to a prayer, an act of faith that happens unexpectedly, where one inevitably succumbs to its depths and allows themselves to experience both joy and sorrow along the journey.
In practice
Using this quote in a wedding ceremony to highlight the unpredictable nature of love.
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...
Love is acceptance. When you love someone . . . you take them into your heart, and that is surely why it hurts so much when we lose someone we love, because we lose a part of ourselves.
Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.
If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.
The only reason I don't throw myself into your arms, kiss you and make love with you now is that I lack the courage and am afraid of loving you.
I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.
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