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 CARSONMyths 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.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
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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.
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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
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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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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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You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?
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The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
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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.
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There is no person without a world.
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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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Lava bread makes you passionate.
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Philosophy – hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
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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.
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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
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He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
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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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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 symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
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He stood against the wind and let it peel him clean.
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
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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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All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
ANNE CARSON