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.
ANNE CARSONHe came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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.
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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.
ANNE CARSON -
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
ANNE CARSON -
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 CARSON -
My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
ANNE CARSON -
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
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 -
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 be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
ANNE CARSON -
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 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 -
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 -
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
ANNE CARSON -
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON






