Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that both saints and poets experience life with intensity and passion rather than restraint.
Anne Sexton's quote implies that true creativity and spiritual expression require a full embrace of emotions and experiences. Saints, representing spiritual ideals, and poets, symbolizing artistic expression, both reject moderation in favor of a vibrant, exuberant approach to life. Their work and actions are marked by fervor and a deep connection to their inner feelings, highlighting the importance of passion in both faith and art.
In practice
In a speech about creativity, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for artists to embrace their emotions fully.
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...
Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.
I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.
You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.
There will be no new music until it's good enough and until I'm ready.
I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
Art has a will of its own. It has nothing to do with the taste of the moment or what's expected of you. That's a formula for dead art, or fashionable art.
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