Top 100 Anne Carson Quotes
#1. The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties.
Susan Stewart
#2. What's here doesn't please you,
what's far off you crave.
Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
Anne Carson
#3. Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
Anne Carson
#4. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
Anne Carson
#5. It is for God to fix the time who knows no time,
Anne Carson
#6. Some conversations are not about what they're about.
Anne Carson
#7. He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
#8. We disappear.
It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.
Moments of death I call them.
Anne Carson
#9. 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
#10. 26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.
Anne Carson
#11. Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.
Anne Carson
#12. Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It's usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Anne Carson
#13. 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.
Anne Carson
#14. I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again if he came near.
Beauty convinces.
Anne Carson
#16. The moon makes a traveler hunger for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question.
Anne Carson
#17. There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.
Anne Carson
#18. Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
Anne Carson
#19. M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories
Anne Carson
#20. When I desire you a part of me is gone...
Anne Carson
#21. 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
#23. Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson
#24. We live by waters breaking out of the heart.
Anne Carson
#25. I never had much education in English poetry as such.
Anne Carson
#26. Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
Anne Carson
#27. A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
Anne Carson
#28. Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
Anne Carson
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Anne Carson
#32. Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
Anne Carson
#33. 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
#34. 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.
Anne Carson
#35. 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
#36. If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".
Anne Carson
#37. But when justice is done the world drops away.
Anne Carson
#38. Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.
Anne Carson
#39. Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
Anne Carson
#40. At the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved ...
Anne Carson
#41. You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that?
And I said,
Where do I put it down?
Anne Carson
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. There is a loneliness that fills the plain.
Total.
Lunar.
Anne Carson
#49. God's pity! How long will it feel like burning?
Anne Carson
#50. Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
Anne Carson
#51. Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
Anne Carson
#52. It stung God. They say his spinal cord ran straight out of the sun.
Anne Carson
#53. My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. 'Listen,' he said, 'life and no escape.
Anne Carson
#54. Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.
Anne Carson
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.
Anne Carson
#58. A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Anne Carson
#60. Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.
Anne Carson
#61. I don't want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Anne Carson
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Caught between the tongue and the taste.
Anne Carson
#65. 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
#66. Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
#67. [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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. M: Is he smart
I: She yes very smart sees right through me
M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
Anne Carson
#71. 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
#72. All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Anne Carson
#73. 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
#74. Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.
Anne Carson
#75. Friends disappear
or they are powerless.
This is what misfortune means
an acid test of friendship.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Anne Carson
#76. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life.
Anne Carson
#77. LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?
It is
to master death.
Anne Carson
#78. To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
#79. And tonight - Geryon? You okay?
Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight - ?
Why do you have your jacket over your head?
...
Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes
I need a little privacy.
Anne Carson
#81. Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse / or so the modern experts maintain. How do people / get power over one another? is an algebraic question
Anne Carson
#82. He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
Anne Carson
#83. 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
#84. Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
Anne Carson
#85. What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
#86. Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life, they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them.
Anne Carson
#88. He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean
Anne Carson
#89. No I mean everything everyone saw everyone saw because I saw it
Anne Carson
#90. You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing.
Anne Carson
#91. A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
#92. 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
#93. Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
#94. 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.
Anne Carson
#95. It was not fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair.
Anne Carson
#96. There it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.
Anne Carson
#97. Youth is a dream where I go every night and wake with just this little jumping bunch of arteries in my hand.
Anne Carson
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.
Anne Carson
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