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 CARSONMeanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.
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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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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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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
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No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.
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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
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What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
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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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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.
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
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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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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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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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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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Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
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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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What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
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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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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
ANNE CARSON