Anne Carson - Desire Quotes

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Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

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

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
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

Anne Carson