Anne Carson Quotes - Page 3

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

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

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

Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches. Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt. He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds. I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

No one will ever make necessity not happen.

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

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.

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.

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

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

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

Desire is no light thing.

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.

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

I was more worn out with the "Odyssey" than it was with the "Iliad." I mean, just comparing those two - you can see how it's changing, how the language of the "Iliad" is somehow monstrously new - and that language of the "Odyssey" is more comfortable, even for us.

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.