Anne Carson quotes
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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
-- Anne Carson -
Under the seams runs the pain.
-- Anne Carson -
As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.
-- Anne Carson -
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.
-- Anne Carson -
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When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
-- Anne Carson -
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
-- Anne Carson -
A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
-- Anne Carson -
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
-- Anne Carson -
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When I desire you a part of me is gone...
-- Anne Carson -
You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?
-- Anne Carson -
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
-- Anne Carson -
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
-- Anne Carson -
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
-- Anne Carson -
Caught between the tongue and the taste.
-- Anne Carson -
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
-- Anne Carson -
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.
-- Anne Carson -
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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.
-- Anne Carson -
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
-- Anne Carson -
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
-- Anne Carson -
We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.
-- Anne Carson -
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Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.
-- Anne Carson -
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
-- Anne Carson -
Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan
-- Anne Carson -
The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
-- Anne Carson -
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What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.
-- Anne Carson -
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
-- Anne Carson -
I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-
-- Anne Carson -
Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
-- Anne Carson -
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
-- Anne Carson -
There is no person without a world.
-- Anne Carson -
All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
-- Anne Carson -
Madness and witchery as well as ***** are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
-- Anne Carson -
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The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
-- Anne Carson -
M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
-- Anne Carson -
Desire is no light thing.
-- Anne Carson -
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
-- Anne Carson -
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
-- Anne Carson -
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
-- Anne Carson -
You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.
-- Anne Carson -
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
-- Anne Carson -
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Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
-- Anne Carson -
Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
-- Anne Carson -
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
-- Anne Carson -
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...
-- Anne Carson -
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What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.
-- Anne Carson -
DEATH . . . And now you are here to fight for this woman. You know her promise is given. She has to die or her husband won't go free. APOLLO Relax, I'm not breaking any laws. DEATH Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws? APOLLO I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.
-- Anne Carson -
Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.
-- Anne Carson -
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
-- Anne Carson -
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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
-- Anne Carson -
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
-- Anne Carson -
No one will ever make necessity not happen.
-- Anne Carson -
I never had much education in English poetry as such,
-- Anne Carson -
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When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.
-- Anne Carson -
I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.
-- Anne Carson -
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
-- Anne Carson -
All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.
-- Anne Carson -
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Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.
-- Anne Carson -
I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.
-- Anne Carson -
I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented... I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
-- Anne Carson -
I don't read reviews and I don't know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.
-- Anne Carson -
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I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.
-- Anne Carson -
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
-- Anne Carson -
Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
-- Anne Carson -
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
-- Anne Carson -
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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.
-- Anne Carson -
THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
-- Anne Carson -
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
-- Anne Carson -
That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted although married six months. Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure we got it right. He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully. Early next day I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published in a small quarterly magazine. Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us. Or should I say ideal. Neither of us had ever seen Venice.
-- Anne Carson -
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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.
-- Anne Carson -
he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean
-- Anne Carson -
Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.
-- Anne Carson -
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
-- Anne Carson -
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I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
-- Anne Carson -
Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.
-- Anne Carson -
You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
-- Anne Carson -
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
-- Anne Carson -
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I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
-- Anne Carson -
My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
-- Anne Carson -
It is for God to fix the time who knows no time,
-- Anne Carson -
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
-- Anne Carson -
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Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
-- Anne Carson -
What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
-- Anne Carson -
Consider incompleteness as a verb.
-- Anne Carson -
I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.
-- Anne Carson -
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
-- Anne Carson -
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.
-- Anne Carson -
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
-- Anne Carson -
You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough,
-- Anne Carson -
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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,
-- Anne Carson -
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
-- Anne Carson -
There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.
-- Anne Carson -
There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.
-- Anne Carson -
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
-- Anne Carson -
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.
-- Anne Carson
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