Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that those contemplating suicide often focus on the methods rather than the reasons for living.
Anne Sexton's quote reflects the idea that individuals struggling with suicidal thoughts are often consumed by the practicalities of ending their lives, likening their mindset to that of carpenters seeking the right tools. By emphasizing their focus on the 'how' rather than the 'why', the quote highlights a profound despair and a disconnection from finding purpose and meaning in life.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about mental health to highlight the complexities faced by those who are suicidal.
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...
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society
The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis.
A man may be theologically knowing and spiritually ignorant.
It seems to me,' said the other, 'That you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.' By George!' said Syme facing round and looking at him, 'What a clever chap you are!
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.
To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.
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