Anne Carson Quotes

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

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

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

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.

Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

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

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

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.

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.

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.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

There is no person without a world.

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.

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.

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.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Under the seams runs the pain.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.