Quotes from Anne Carson

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

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn't the simple fact of the matter that she was bored?

some hours later they were down at the railroad tracks standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead scattering drops of itself.

Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt—but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.

Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.

When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters 'I love you' in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between 'you' in the text and you in my life.

I lack myself.

Who knows what will happen if I'm alone with my grief.

perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins "I lose my screams" dear Antigone, I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams

Who does not end up a female impersonator?

He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [...] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening.

Town of the Dragon Vein If you wake up too early listen for it. A sort of inverted whistling the sound of sound. Being withdrawn after all where? Does all the sound in the world. Come from day after day? From mountains but. They have to give it back. At night just. As your nightly dreams. Are taps. Open reversely. In. To. Time.

Where does unbelief begin? / When I was young // there were degrees of certainty. / I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. / Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands / occasionally disappear–

Nighthawks I wanted to run away with you tonight but you are a difficult woman the rules of you - Past and future circle round us now we know more now less in the institute of shadows. On a street black as widows with nothing to confess our distances found us the rules of you - so difficult a woman I wanted to run away with you tonight.

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence. Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches. ... Geryon was going into the Bus Depot one Friday night about three a.m. to get change to call home. Herakles stepped oof the bus from New Mexico and Geryon came fast around the corner of the platform and there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

I will not stop singing the Muses who set me dancing.

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? She shifted to a question about airports.

THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

Time as hunger. Time passing and gazing. Time as perseverance. Mountain time. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.

These days Geryon was experiencing a pain not felt since childhood. His wings were struggling. They tore against each other on his shoulders like the little mindless red animals they were.

to carry one's own door will make a person clumsy, tired and strange on the other hand, it may come in useful if you go places that don't have an obvious way in, like normality or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind

M: ... but everytime I start in everytime I everytime you see I would have to tell the whole story all over again or else lie so I lie I just lie who are they who are the storytellers who can put an end to stories