Anne Carson Quotes

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

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.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Under the seams runs the pain.

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.

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.

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.

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.

Philosophy – hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

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.

I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

Lava bread makes you passionate.

Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

I never really got over the fun of making letters.

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.