Quotes by Anne Carson

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

“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 pro...”

“Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”

“He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.”

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

“Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it's dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on ...”

“LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.”

“Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”

“That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seeme...”

“[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 sa...”

“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 luminou...”

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”

“Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for todayAdjudicateLegislateScandalizeCapitalizehere are Kreon's nounsMenReasonTreasonDeathShip of StateMineChorus: "mine" isn't a nounKreon: it is if you capitalize it”

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”

“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 wh...”

“I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.”

“Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters ...”

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”

“perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poemfrom the last years of her life that begins"I lose my screams"dear Antigone,I take it as the task of the translatorto forbid that you should ever lose yo...”

“What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.”