Anne Carson Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Anne Carson
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

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

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

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

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
She doesn't get to say much in the official biography —
I believe they are out of wine, etc.,
practical things —
watching with one eye as he goes about the world
calling himself The Son Of Man.

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

Anne Carson
When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.

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

Anne Carson
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,

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

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

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

Anne Carson
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
My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

Anne Carson
The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.

Anne Carson
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Anne Carson
All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

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
SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING is something you know instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head at sixteen.

Anne Carson