Anne Carson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anne Carson

Anne Carson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anne Carson on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

English is a bitch

When I desire you a part of me is gone...

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

Facts are bigger in the dark.

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

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

God's pity! How long will it feel like burning?

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

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

There is no person without a world.

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Friends disappear
or they are powerless.
This is what misfortune means
an acid test of friendship.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

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

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

Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.

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

No one will ever make necessity not happen.

I will not stop singing
the Muses who set me dancing.

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

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

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

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.

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

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

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

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

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

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.

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

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

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

Youth is a dream where I go every night and wake with just this little jumping bunch of arteries in my hand.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

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

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

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.

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

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red

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

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

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.

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

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?

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

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

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

I am a drop of gold he would say
I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-

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

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

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

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

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

I shall not walk your ways again.

Some conversations are not about what they're about.

It is for God to fix the time who knows no time,

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

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

Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb.

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.

Lava bread makes you passionate.

There it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.

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

XXIV. And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud

Love does not
make me gentle or kind.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

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

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life.

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that?
And I said,
Where do I put it down?

No I mean everything everyone saw everyone saw because I saw it

Desire is no light thing.

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

But when justice is done the world drops away.

Trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock
to return to the cut soul.

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

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

Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens to the black space where his consciousness is, moving towards her.

Like honey is the sleep of the just.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Repent means the pain again.

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

It is perilous to live past the end of your myth

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.

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

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

I am talking about evil.
It blooms.
It eats.
It grins.

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

Pilgrims were people in scientific exile.

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.

Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.

Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.

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

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

He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

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