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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on childhood perceptions and the fear of becoming what we once judged.
In this quote, Anne Sexton explores the complex emotions tied to memories of an unusual neighbor, whom the children viewed as a witch. The speaker recalls the woman's harsh words and peculiar appearance, contrasting them with her own current reflections and fears of morphing into that very figure, illustrating how our childhood fears can shape our adult identities and perspectives.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about how childhood experiences shape our adult lives.
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...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?
Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed; but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the association pleasing, and give probable hopes that they shall be disciplined by an easy separation...to die is the fate of man; but to die with lingering anguish is generally his folly.
I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
Swans live wherever there is water, and leave the place where water dries up; let not a man act so - and comes and goes as he pleases.
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