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.
ANNE CARSONI 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.
More Anne Carson Quotes
-
-
Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.
ANNE CARSON -
I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
ANNE CARSON -
My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
ANNE CARSON -
He stood against the wind and let it peel him clean.
ANNE CARSON -
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
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 -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
ANNE CARSON -
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
ANNE CARSON -
Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.
ANNE CARSON -
Under the seams runs the pain.
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 -
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 CARSON -
It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
ANNE CARSON -
The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
ANNE CARSON -
No one will ever make necessity not happen.
ANNE CARSON -
You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
ANNE CARSON -
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
ANNE CARSON -
Desire is no light thing.
ANNE CARSON -
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
ANNE CARSON -
You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
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