I never had much education in English poetry as such.
ANNE CARSONWhat is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
ANNE CARSON -
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
ANNE CARSON -
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
ANNE CARSON -
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
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 -
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
ANNE CARSON -
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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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
ANNE CARSON -
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
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






