Quotes from Anne Carson

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.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

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. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth's core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil but if some god shakes your house ruin arrives ruin does not leave it comes tolling over the generations it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor and all your thrashed coasts groan

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

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

M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more

Love does not make me gentle or kind.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

Four of the roses were on fire. They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets and howling colossal intimacies from the back of their fused throats. - XXVII. MITWELT

And now time is rushing towards them where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.

I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country. I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape

When you are falling in love it is always already too late: d?ute, as the poets say.

I am a restrained person. Otherwise my heart would race past my tongue to pour out everything. Instead I mumble, I gnaw myself. I lose hope. And my mind is burning.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.

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.

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. Ismene: Who said that? Antigone: Hegel. Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett. Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel. Ismene: I don't think so.

he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean

If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".