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.
ANNE CARSONWhy does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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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Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
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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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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.
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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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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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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
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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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Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.
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Lava bread makes you passionate.
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He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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 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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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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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
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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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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
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It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
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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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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
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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.
ANNE CARSON