Anne Carson Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more

Anne Carson
Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.

Anne Carson
Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.

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

Anne Carson
Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

Anne Carson
Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

Anne Carson
As lover you reach forward to a point in time called "then" when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as "then" supervenes upon "now," the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.

Anne Carson
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Anne Carson
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

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

Anne Carson
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Anne Carson
What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

Anne Carson
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 Carson
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

Anne Carson
Why does it enrage an animal to be given what it already knows?

Anne Carson
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

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
While the shadows like long fingers
over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

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
You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.

Anne Carson
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Anne Carson
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.

Anne Carson
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

Anne Carson
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

Anne Carson