Anne Carson Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.

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

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

Anne Carson
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

Anne Carson
What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

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

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

Anne Carson