He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
ANNE CARSONAll human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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.
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There is no person without a world.
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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
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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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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
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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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Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows – dear stench.
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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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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
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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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Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
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Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
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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.
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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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All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
ANNE CARSON -
It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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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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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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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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