Anne Carson Quotes
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.
Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.
You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-