You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” And I said, “where can I put it down?
ANNE CARSONThe 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.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
ANNE CARSON -
I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
ANNE CARSON -
Desire is no light thing.
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What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
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Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.
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.
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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.
ANNE CARSON -
Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
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Poetry – poiesis means a thing made.
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I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.
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 -
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
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Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
ANNE CARSON -
I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
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 -
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
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 -
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 -
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
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Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
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 -
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
ANNE CARSON -
Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
ANNE CARSON