Anne Carson

Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

— Anne Carson

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares…

— Anne Carson

“A gust of night pushed its way in the door and everyone inside wavered once like stalks in a field then resumed…

— Anne Carson

I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness…

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

“Town of the Dragon Vein If you wake up too early listen for it. A sort of inverted whistling the sound of…

— Anne Carson

Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good…

— Anne Carson

Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But…

— Anne Carson

“perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins "I lose my screams" dear Antigone,…

— 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,…

— Anne Carson

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been…

— Anne Carson

DEATH . . . And now you are here to fight for this woman. You know her promise is given. She has…

— Anne Carson

“These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood. His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his…

— Anne Carson

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

— 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…

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

“You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still…

— Anne Carson

I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be…

— Anne Carson

“It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly…

— Anne Carson

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling…

— Anne Carson

I was more worn out with the "Odyssey" than it was with the "Iliad." I mean, just comparing those two - you…

— Anne Carson

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and…

— Anne Carson

“In later years this is the one memory he wishes would go away and not come back. And the reason he cannot…

— Anne Carson

“Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. Ismene: Who said that? Antigone: Hegel. Ismene: Sounds more…

— Anne Carson

“Note that the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental…

— Anne Carson

“Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for today Adjudicate Legislate Scandalize Capitalize here are Kreon's nouns Men Reason Treason Death Ship of State…

— Anne Carson

Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But…

— Anne Carson

“M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over…

— 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…

— Anne Carson

“Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil but if some god shakes your house ruin arrives ruin does not…

— Anne Carson