You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed; lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a deep and intimate connection between two lovers, highlighting the strength and tenderness of their bond.
In this quote, Anne Sexton uses vivid imagery to convey the complexity of love, portraying a relationship that embodies both vulnerability and strength. The comparison of a small fist to a snail suggests a delicate yet firm presence, while the depiction of lips as animals underscores the raw, instinctual nature of desire and affection. Sexton emphasizes that experiencing hunger or longing in a relationship is a natural and not necessarily negative part of love, suggesting that passion and need are intertwined in human connections.
In practice
During a wedding speech, to highlight the bond between spouses.
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...
Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
When two people loved each other they worked together always, two against the world, a little company. Joy was shared; trouble was split. You had an ally.
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.
The loveliest, sweetest flower that bloomed in paradise, and the first that died, has rarely blossomed since on mortal soil. It is so frail, so delicate, a thing, it is gone if it but look upon itself; and she who ventures to esteem it hers proves by that single thought she has it not.
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