Best 131 quotes of Anne Carson on MyQuotes

Anne Carson

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    Anne Carson

    All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

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    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.

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    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?

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    Anne Carson

    A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

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    Anne Carson

    A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.

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    Anne Carson

    A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

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    Anne Carson

    Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Anne Carson

    At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving; this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.

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    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.

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    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

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    Anne Carson

    Caught between the tongue and the taste.

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    Anne Carson

    Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.

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    Anne Carson

    Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

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    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.

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    Anne Carson

    Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

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    Anne Carson

    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.

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    Anne Carson

    Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

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    Anne Carson

    Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.

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    Anne Carson

    Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

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    Anne Carson

    He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

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    Anne Carson

    Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

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    Anne Carson

    he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean

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    Anne Carson

    He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

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    Anne Carson

    Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

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    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-

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    Anne Carson

    I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Anne Carson

    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.

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    Anne Carson

    If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Anne Carson

    It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

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    Anne Carson

    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.

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    Anne Carson

    It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

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    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.

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    Anne Carson

    I was more worn out with the "Odyssey" than it was with the "Iliad." I mean, just comparing those two - you can see how it's changing, how the language of the "Iliad" is somehow monstrously new - and that language of the "Odyssey" is more comfortable, even for us.

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    Anne Carson

    Lava bread makes you passionate.

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    Anne Carson

    Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.

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    Anne Carson

    Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

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    Anne Carson

    Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

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    Anne Carson

    Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

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    Anne Carson

    Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.

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    Anne Carson

    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.

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    Anne Carson

    Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

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    Anne Carson

    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.

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    Anne Carson

    M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more