Anne Carson Quotes

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”

— Anne Carson

“Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.”

— Anne Carson

Under the seams runs the pain.

— 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

“What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.”

— Anne Carson

“To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn't
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It's not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.”

— 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

“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

“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

“They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”

— Anne Carson

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

— 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

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

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

“There is no person without a world.”

— Anne Carson

“Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.”

— Anne Carson

M: Is he smart
I: She yes very smart sees right through me
M: In my day we valued blindness rather more

— Anne Carson

“When I desire you
a part of me
is gone.”

— 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

“He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean”

— 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

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that?
And I said,
Where do I put it down?”

— Anne Carson

DEATH
...
And now you are here to fight for this woman.
You know her promise is given.
She has to die or her husband won't go free.
APOLLO
Relax, I'm not breaking any laws.
DEATH
Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws?
APOLLO
I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.

— Anne Carson

“He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.”

— 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

“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

“Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.”

— Anne Carson

“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.”

— Anne Carson

Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.

— Anne Carson

“I will not stop singing
the Muses who set me dancing.”

— Anne Carson

“LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?
It is
to master death.”

— 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

“People really understand very little of one another. Sometimes when I speak to him, my Cid looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something (a city on a map?) like someone who has tumbled off a star. But he's not the one who feels alien-ever, I think. He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart. Like Sokrates he fails to understand why travel should be such a challenge to the muscles of the heart, for other people. Around every bend of the road is a city of gold, isn't it?
I am the kind of person who thinks no, probably not. And we walk, side by side, in different countries.”

— Anne Carson

“It is perilous to live past the end of your myth”

— 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

“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

“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

“But when justice is done the world drops away.”

— Anne Carson

“Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.
Ismene: Who said that?
Antigone: Hegel.
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett.
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel.
Ismene: I don't think so.”

— 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

“Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully”

— Anne Carson

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 amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.

— Anne Carson

“My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.”

— Anne Carson

“Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.”

— Anne Carson

“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 the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.”

— Anne Carson

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

— Anne Carson

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself,

— 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

“At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving; this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.”

— Anne Carson

“It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.”

— Anne Carson