Anne Carson Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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