Anne Carson Quotes

84 quotes in 1275 categories

• What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to…
• Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch.…
• He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
• We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking…
• M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
• The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining…
• Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
• Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
• 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…
• The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
• 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…
• Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
• To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
• I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-
• he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean
• Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
• You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?
• They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
• There is no person without a world.
• It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

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