All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
ANNE CARSONMaybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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.
ANNE CARSON -
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
ANNE CARSON -
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
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 -
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
ANNE CARSON -
Caught between the tongue and the taste.
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 -
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.
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 -
Desire is no light thing.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
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 -
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
ANNE CARSON -
Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you’ve made something, it’ll – the world will be different.
ANNE CARSON -
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
ANNE CARSON