Anne Carson - Eros the bittersweet (1986)

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

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

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