Anne Carson Quotes

I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp
brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure. ~ Anne Carson

M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories ~ Anne Carson

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue. ~ Anne Carson

Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb. ~ Anne Carson

Winter noon is on the rise. Weak suns yet alive
are as virtue to suns of that other day.
For the poor town dreams
of surrender, mother
never untender,
mother gallant
and gay. ~ Anne Carson

There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours. ~ Anne Carson

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty. ~ Anne Carson

Some conversations are not about what they're about. ~ Anne Carson

Caught between the tongue and the taste. ~ Anne Carson

Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy. ~ Anne Carson

To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you. ~ Anne Carson

A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside. ~ Anne Carson

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. ~ Anne Carson

Where does unbelief begin? / When I was young // there were degrees of certainty. / I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. / Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands / occasionally disappear– ~ Anne Carson

When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters 'I love you' in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between 'you' in the text and you in my life. ~ 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

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

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project. ~ Anne Carson

Under the seams runs the pain. ~ Anne Carson

Who knows what will happen if I'm alone with my grief. ~ Anne Carson

HE WAS FOURTEEN
it was years ago and Sad's
name wasn't Sad yet. First
comet. G had just
stumbled off a bus they
looked at one another and
that lasted until G was
almost twenty but he.
Well. Being a loyal soul
himself. Sad's need to
make friends everywhere.
Sex friends club friends
gym friends dope friends
shopping friends
breakdown friends a
common enough problem.
Sad didn't see a problem.
One day he looked around
and G was gone. ~ Anne Carson

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

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God? ~ Anne Carson

CHORUS
Many are the shapes of things divine.
Many are the unexpected acts of gods.
What we imagined did not come to pass --
God found a way
to be surprising.
That's how this went. ~ 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

Isaiah go home and get some sleep, said God.

Isaiah went home, slept, woke again.

Isaiah felt a sensation below the neck, it was a silk and bitter sensation.

Isaiah looked down.

It was milk forcing the nipples open.

Isaiah was more than whole.

I am not with you am in you, said the muffled white voice of God. ~ Anne Carson

I am not a person who feels easy talking about blood or desire. I rarely used the word woman myself. But such things are the natural facts of what we are, I suppose we have to follow out these signs in the endless struggle against forgetting. The truth is, I lived out my adolescence mainly in default of my father's favor. But I perceived that I could trouble him less if I had no gender. ~ Anne Carson

Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud. ~ Anne Carson

26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia. ~ Anne Carson

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing. ~ Anne Carson

This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth. ~ Anne Carson

Fr. 2
All We as Leaves
He (following Homer) compares man's life with the leaves.
All we as leaves in the shock of it:
spring-
one dull gold bounce and you're there.
You see the sun? - I built that.
As a lad. The Fates lashing their tails in a corner.
But (let me think) wasn't it a hotel in Chicago where I had the first of those - my body walking out of the room
bent on some deadly errand
and me up on the ceiling just sort of fading out-
brainsex paintings I used to call them?
In the days when I (so to speak) painted.
Remember
that oddly wonderful chocolate we got in East
(as it was then) Berlin? ~ Anne Carson

No I do not like blaming. Because for me it's enough
if someone is other than bad - not too much out of hand,
conscious at least of the justice that helps the city,
a healthy man. No I shall not
lay blame. Because fools
are a species that never ends.
All things, you know, are beautiful with which
ugly things are not mixed. ~ Simonides Of Ceos

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

Her marble tears run down her marble face.
A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief.

Who has no words to say.

Whose shadow mind is burning
as he sits watching her hands
and thinks how rare!

to see a Roman
talk
with no gestures at all. ~ Anne Carson

I've come to understand the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with the space where God would be if God were available, but God isn't. ~ Anne Carson

Three days
(so I hear)
she is without food,
keeps her body
pure of bread, longs to
run herself aground
in a sad secret death.

Is it a god inside you, girl? ~ Anne Carson

And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back. ~ 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

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can. ~ Anne Carson

Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue green shoots and the plant called "audacity", which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said ... I will do anything to escape boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. 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

I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again if he came near.
Beauty convinces. ~ Anne Carson

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening. ~ Anne Carson

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English. ~ Anne Carson

The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of   his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. ~ Anne Carson

Perhaps because I have spent hours sermonizing to students about the sins of the passive voice - how it can obfuscate meaning, deaden vitality, and abandon the task of assigning agency or responsibility - I find the grammar of justice maddening. It's always "rendered," "served," or "done." It always swoops down from on high - from God, from the state - like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in Earth's final hour. It is not, apparently, something we can give to one other, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck. The problem may also lie in the word itself, as for millennia "justice" has meant both "retribution" and "equality," as if a gaping chasm did not separate the two.

If you really want to know what justice is, don't only ask questions and then score off anyone who answers, and refute him, roars Thrasymachus to Socrates in The Republic. You know very well that it is much easier to ask questions than to answer them. Give an answer yourself and tell us what you say justice is. When justice is done, writes Anne Carson, the world drops away. This does not seem to me a happy thought. I am not yet sure I want the world to drop away. ~ Maggie Nelson

I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life. ~ Anne Carson

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted
although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice. ~ Anne Carson

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922)

She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed.
Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay...
and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925).
She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days.
Fog choked the city.
Russia's great poets were all about 35 years ol
Scraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun. ~ Anne Carson

Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that. ~ Anne Carson

How does distance look? is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. ~ Anne Carson

At the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved ... ~ 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

It is for God to fix the time who knows no time, ~ Anne Carson

It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love -

blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger. ~ Anne Carson

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light. ~ Anne Carson

I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time. ~ Anne Carson

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

In later years this
is the one memory he
wishes would go away and
not come back. And the
reason he cannot bear her
dying is not the loss of her
(which is the future) but
that dying puts the two of
them (now) into this
nakedness together that is
unforgiveable. They do not
forgive it. He turns away.
This roaring air in his
arms. She is released. ~ Anne Carson

Comparison
makes you less interesting
to yourself doesn't it.
Your magic contracts your
body putting forth no frill
under another's gaze. ~ Anne Carson

LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?
It is
to master death. ~ Anne Carson

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. ~ 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. ~ Anne Carson

She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said. ~ Anne Carson

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures. ~ Anne Carson

I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can't start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn't say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is. ~ Anne Carson

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

Let's do something cheerful
all your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.
Geryon watched the top of Herakles' head
and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. He looked at this fact
in mild surprise. Once in childhood
his ice cream had been eaten by a dog. Just an empty con
in a small dramatic red fist.
Herakles stood up. No? Let's go then. On the way home they tried "Joy To The World"
but were too tired. It seemed a long drive. ~ 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

Pylades: I'll take care of you.
Orestes: It's rotten work.
Pylades: Not to me. Not if it's you. ~ Anne Carson, Euripides

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. ~ Anne Carson

Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars. ~ Anne Carson

You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing. ~ Anne Carson

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary. ~ Anne Carson

Banal sexism aside,
I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought. ~ Anne Carson

THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM
[all snap flags]
Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem. ~ Anne Carson

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

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

What difference would such power make to
someone in love? What would the lover ask of time if he were in control? ~ Anne Carson

A gust of night pushed its way in the door
and everyone inside wavered once like stalks in a field then resumed their talk. ~ Anne Carson

I don't want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable. ~ Anne Carson

I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God. ~ Anne Carson

I'm a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren't I
not at home with the dead nor with the living ~ 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

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. ~ Anne Carson

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them. ~ Anne Carson

Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual. ~ Anne Carson

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me. ~ Anne Carson

I don't read reviews and I don't know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid. ~ Anne Carson

But when justice is done the world drops away. ~ Anne Carson

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

I never had much education in English poetry as such. ~ Anne Carson

Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt - but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal. ~ Anne Carson

Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn't the simple fact of the matter that she was bored? ~ Anne Carson

Components of today include a shape asleep on the floor an erased white world the tumblers vibrating in the closet and he brought the wrong book. Alive in a room as usual. ~ Anne Carson

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. ~ Anne Carson

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability. ~ Anne Carson

When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right. ~ Anne Carson

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me. ~ Anne Carson