Quotes from Anne Carson

26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.

The instant of nature forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life leaving behind just ghosts rustling like an old map.

And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.

for when I look at you, even for a moment, no speaking is left in me

There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless, but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that victims are killed, but there are not empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along.

In ancient Greek you use the verb ????????, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapper, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape—words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world.

My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.

Her marble tears run down her marble face. A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief. Who has no words to say. Whose shadow mind is burning as he sits watching her hands and thinks how rare! to see a Roman talk with no gestures at all.

That tang of dogshit in darkness. That's your starry crown.

Although a monster Geryon could be charming in company.

So about an hour later we are in the taxi shooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm. As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.

My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night. I open mine as wide as possible. I like to see everything, I say. What's there to see? Moon. Air. Sunrise. All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up. I like to wake up.

I had not been in love before. It was like a wheel rolling downhill.

A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.

You see the sun?—I built that.

Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life, it's just catastrophe.

all the tall mad mountains of her mind

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

I have never known a closeness like that (…) I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty. What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Like the dogs, names, down there, starving.

At what point does one say of a man that he has become unreal? He hugged his overcoat closer and tried to assemble in his mind Heidegger's argument about the use of moods. We would think ourselves continuous with the world if we did not have moods. It is state-of-mind that discloses to us (Heidegger claims) that we are beings who have been thrown into something else.

Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons. But his reckoning involves a

what song of death, what dance of Hades shall I do?

God's pity! How long will it feel like burning?