Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
ANNE CARSONAt 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.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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.
ANNE CARSON -
It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
ANNE CARSON -
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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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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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
ANNE CARSON -
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
ANNE CARSON -
Philosophy – hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
ANNE CARSON -
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
ANNE CARSON -
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
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 -
I never had much education in English poetry as such.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
ANNE CARSON -
No one will ever make necessity not happen.
ANNE CARSON -
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
There is no person without a world.
ANNE CARSON -
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
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 -
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
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