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.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the enduring nature of pain and how it accumulates over time, impacting our lives profoundly.
Anne Sexton's quote reflects on the experience of pain as a continuous and overwhelming presence in our lives. It suggests that even a small amount of pain can be significant, as it becomes part of our personal history, mixing with past experiences and creating a deep reservoir of emotional turmoil. The imagery of treading water and floating highlights the struggle that accompanies living with such pain, evoking the challenges of survival and coping in the face of hardship.
In practice
Sharing this quote at a support group for those dealing with grief.
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 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...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.
I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short.
I don't think it's the most important thing in life to fit it. I think it's the most important thing in life to dance to the beat of your own drum and to look like you're having more fun than the people who look cool like they fit in.
Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.
When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.
She would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating up hundreds of miles a day with a help of the perpetual tailwind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.