It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
ANNE CARSONHomer 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.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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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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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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.
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No one will ever make necessity not happen.
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I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.
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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
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Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.
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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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A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
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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.
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
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Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
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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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We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
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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.
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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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Lava bread makes you passionate.
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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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Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
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It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
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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.
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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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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
ANNE CARSON