Quotes from Anne Carson

Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.

Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.

There is no person without a world.

Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

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

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. 'Listen,' he said, 'life and no escape.

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

Girls are cruelest to themselves. Someone like Emily Brontë, who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman, had cruelty drifted up in all the cracks of her like spring snow.

You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.

And tonight—Geryon? You okay? Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight—? Why do you have your jacket over your head? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes I need a little privacy.

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

Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.

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

I suppose you do love me, in your way," I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. "And how else should I love you —in your way?" he asked. I am still thinking about that.

I don't want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.

The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.

Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse / or so the modern experts maintain. How do people / get power over one another? is an algebraic question

I am talking about evil. It blooms. It eats. It grins.

I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.