Quotes from Anne Carson

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

DEATH . . . And now you are here to fight for this woman. You know her promise is given. She has to die or her husband won't go free. APOLLO Relax, I'm not breaking any laws. DEATH Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws? APOLLO I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.

Some conversations are not about what they're about.

Three days (so I hear) she is without food, keeps her body pure of bread, longs to run herself aground in a sad secret death. Is it a god inside you, girl?

The fact is that there are people, good people who, not because they want to but all the same, fall in love with the wrong thing.

Look at me. This is nobility in a man: to bear what falls from the gods and not say No.

I'm a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren't I not at home with the dead nor with the living

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

Dionysus does not explain or regret anything. He is pleased if he can cause you to perform, despite your plan, despite your politics, despite your neuroses, despite even your Dionysian theories of self, something quite previous, the desire before the desire, the lick of beginning to know you don't know. If life is a stage, that is the show. Exit Dionysus.

It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now. This is not uncommon after loss of love— blue and black and red blasting the crater open. I am interested in anger.

Banal sexism aside, I find myself tempted to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge for all that life withheld from Emily. But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation. As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought.

H of H: I cannot rise. Too heavy with filth and sin. Th: Give me your hand. H of H: I'll stain you. Th: I'll take it.

I walk and walk with cold hands. Back at the house it is filled with longing, nothing to carry longing away. I look back over my life. I try to find analogies. There are none. I have longed for people before, I have loved people before. Not like this. It was not this.

Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

You are a person in love with the impossible

Lava bread makes you passionate.

Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling and desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, category of thought, are confounded.

Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.

She said, When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not go away? I was amazed. Go away where? I said.

There is a loneliness that fills the plain. Total. Lunar.

We live by waters breaking out of the heart.

Note that the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.