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!
The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.
I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.
Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.
It will come sometime. Some beautiful morning she will just wake up and find it is Tomorrow. Not Today but Tomorrow. And then things will happen ... wonderful things.
I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.
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