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.
ANNE CARSONHomer 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.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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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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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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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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You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?
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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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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
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Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.
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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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Caught between the tongue and the taste.
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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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Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows – dear stench.
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No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.
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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
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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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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
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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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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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Maybe 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.
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The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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Poetry – poiesis means a thing made.
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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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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.
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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
ANNE CARSON