Quotes from Anne Carson

Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.

Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She listens to the black space where his consciousness is, moving towards her.

This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth.

Repent means "the pain again.

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.

So much human cruelty is simply incidental is simply brainless. Simply no common sense. 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.

He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart.

And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.

Yellow? said Geryon. And he was thinking Yellow! Yellow! Even in dreams he doesn't know me at all! Yellow!

English is a bitch

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

You can have your rich table and life flowing over the cup. I need one food: I must not violate Elektra.

The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions

From girl to woman to who I am now, from love to anger to this cold marrow, from fire to shelter to fire.

in between the neighbour who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face "lit up by a divine light" and the sister who tells us Emily never made a friend in her life, is a space where the little raw soul slips through.

And yet hope turns out to be let's face it mostly delusion a word derived from Latin ludere meaning "to play a game with oneself or others"...

Monogamous. I'm interested in monogamous. I got married last May and had my honeymoon is Stykkishólmur. This year I returned to Stykkishólmur to live with my husband for three months in one small room. This extreme monogamy proved almost too much for us. Rather than murder each other we rented a second place (Greta's house) near the pool. Now we are happily duogamous.

Do you have change for a dollar? Geryon heard Geryon say. No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I'll give you a quarter for free. Why would you do that? I believe in being gracious. 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. You're cold, said Herakles suddenly, your hands are cold. Here. He put Geryon's hands inside his shirt.

To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.

But whenever I take to my restless dreamless dewdrenched bed I cannot close my eyes – fear stands over me instead of sleep. And whenever I think to sing or hum a tune to stay awake then my tears fall. This house is in trouble. The good days are gone. How I pray for a change! A happy change! A light in darkness.

trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.

It was not fear of ridicule, to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life, but this blank desertion of his own mind that threw him into despair.

Facts are bigger in the dark.