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 CARSONCould you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
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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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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Under the seams runs the pain.
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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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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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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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Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.
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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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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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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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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
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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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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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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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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
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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.
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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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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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There is no person without a world.
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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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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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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