Quotes from 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.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Under the seams runs the pain.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

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.

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.

Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

Depression is one of the unknown modes of being. There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity. All language can register is the slow return to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape and habit blurs perception and language takes up its routine flourishes.

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

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.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.

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.