Anne Carson - Autobiography of Red (1998)

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

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

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

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
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