Quotes from Anne Carson

We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.

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.

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.

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

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.

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.

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

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

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHINGis something you knowinstinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your headat sixteen.

As lover you reach forward to a point in time called "then" when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as "then" supervenes upon "now," the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

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.

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

How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.

we disappear. It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back. Moments of death I call them.

You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness." Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.