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 CARSONMy religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
More Anne Carson Quotes
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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
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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.
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No one will ever make necessity not happen.
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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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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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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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We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
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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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Under the seams runs the pain.
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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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It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
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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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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 -
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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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.
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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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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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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
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.
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A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
ANNE CARSON -
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
ANNE CARSON