Quotes from Anne Carson

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

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

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

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.

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

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

Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

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.

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.

XXIV. And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud

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.

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.

I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented... I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.