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 CARSONTo be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
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 -
Poetry – poiesis means a thing made.
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 -
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 -
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
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 -
Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
ANNE CARSON -
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
ANNE CARSON -
There is no person without a world.
ANNE CARSON -
Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
ANNE CARSON -
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
ANNE CARSON -
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
ANNE CARSON -
Desire is no light thing.
ANNE CARSON -
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
ANNE CARSON -
No one will ever make necessity not happen.
ANNE CARSON -
It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
ANNE CARSON -
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
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 -
You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON -
Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
ANNE CARSON -
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 -
My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
ANNE CARSON -
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.
ANNE CARSON