Anne Carson Quotes & Sayings

#1. Winter noon is on the rise. Weak suns yet alive
are as virtue to suns of that other day.
For the poor town dreams
of surrender, mother
never untender,
mother gallant
and gay.

Anne Carson

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.

Anne Carson

#5. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#7. It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.

Anne Carson

#8. Caught between the tongue and the taste.

Anne Carson

#9. Some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.

Anne Carson

#10. These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood.
His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders
like the little mindless red animals they were.

Anne Carson

#11. I don't want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.

Anne Carson

#12. Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#14. He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Anne Carson

#15. And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.

Anne Carson

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. What's here doesn't please you,
what's far off you crave.
Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Anne Carson

#20. Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#22. You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing.

Anne Carson

#23. LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?
It is
to master death.

Anne Carson

#24. He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean

Anne Carson

#25. Like honey is the sleep of the just.

Anne Carson

#26. What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

Anne Carson

#27. Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Anne Carson

#28. Four of the roses were on fire.
They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies
from the back of their fused throats.
- XXVII. MITWELT

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#30. To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Anne Carson

#31. No I mean everything everyone saw everyone saw because I saw it

Anne Carson

#32. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

Anne Carson

#33. Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Anne Carson

#34. I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#36. 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

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

Anne Carson

#38. Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It's usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Anne Carson

#39. 26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.

Anne Carson

#40. What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.
I don't know.
I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,
no help there.

Anne Carson

#41. We disappear.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them.

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#43. Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

Anne Carson

#44. Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Anne Carson

#45. There is a loneliness that fills the plain.
Total.
Lunar.

Anne Carson

#46. Components of today include a shape asleep on the floor an erased white world the tumblers vibrating in the closet and he brought the wrong book. Alive in a room as usual.

Anne Carson

#47. 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

#48. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

Anne Carson

#49. 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

#50. Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully

Anne Carson

#51. Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.

Anne Carson

#52. Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.

Anne Carson

#53. If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".

Anne Carson

#54. 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

#55. How does distance look? is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Anne Carson

#60. She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone's arm after you grab it?

Anne Carson

#61. 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

#62. Under the seams runs the pain.

Anne Carson

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

Anne Carson

#64. They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

Anne Carson

#65. Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.

Anne Carson

#66. That tang of dogshit in darkness. That's your starry crown.

Anne Carson

#67. She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.

Anne Carson

#68. When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right.

Anne Carson

#69. The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

Anne Carson

#70. We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

Anne Carson

#71. Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

Anne Carson

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. It is perilous to live past the end of your myth

Anne Carson

#75. ... in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face "lit up by a divine light"
and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul
slips through.

Anne Carson

#76. Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil
but if some god shakes your house
ruin arrives
ruin does not leave
it comes tolling over the generations
it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor
and all your thrashed coasts groan

Anne Carson

#77. 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

#78. Kinds of water drown us. Kinds of water do not.

Anne Carson

#79. The fact that Anna is somewhere
having coffee or a dream
is an assault on me.
I hate these moments of poverty.
What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists.
Like the dogs, names,
down there,
starving.

Anne Carson

#80. 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

#81. No one will ever make necessity not happen.

Anne Carson

#82. 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

#83. I've come to understand the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with the space where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.

Anne Carson

#84. Her marble tears run down her marble face.
A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief.

Who has no words to say.

Whose shadow mind is burning
as he sits watching her hands
and thinks how rare!

to see a Roman
talk
with no gestures at all.

Anne Carson

#85. Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

Anne Carson

#86. Repent means the pain again.

Anne Carson

#87. 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

#88. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Anne Carson

#89. Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition.

Anne Carson

#90. Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

Anne Carson

#91. What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

Anne Carson

#92. 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