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Anne Carson Quotes | Quotes said by Anne Carson

  • Anne Carson Quote #1

    ...And tonight—Geryon? You okay?
    Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight—?
    Why do you have your jacket over your head?
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes
    I need a little privacy.


  • Anne Carson Quote #2

    ...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.

  • Anne Carson Quote #3

    [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 say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

  • Anne Carson Quote #4

    [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!

  • Anne Carson Quote #5

    A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

  • Anne Carson Quote #6

    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.

  • Anne Carson Quote #7

    at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…

  • Anne Carson Quote #8

    Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil
    but if some god shakes your house
    ruin arrives
    ruin does not leave
    it comes tolling over the generations
    it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor
    and all your thrashed coasts groan

  • Anne Carson Quote #9

    But when justice is done the world drops away.

  • Anne Carson Quote #10

    Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
    Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
    Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
    All mortals owe a debt to death.
    There's no one alive
    who can say if he will be tomorrow.
    Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.
    No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.
    Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!
    But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess.
    You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?
    I think so. How about a drink.
    Put on a garland. I'm sure
    the happy splash of wine will cure your mood.
    We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.
    Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,
    it's just catastrophe.

  • Anne Carson Quote #11

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

  • Anne Carson Quote #12

    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.

  • Anne Carson Quote #13

    Friends disappear
    or they are powerless.
    This is what misfortune means
    an acid test of friendship.
    I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

  • Anne Carson Quote #14

    He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

  • Anne Carson Quote #15

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

  • Anne Carson Quote #16

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

  • Anne Carson Quote #17

    I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.

  • Anne Carson Quote #18

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

  • Anne Carson Quote #19

    It is perilous to live past the end of your myth

  • Anne Carson Quote #20

    LIII.
    What is the holiness of conversation?

    It is
    to master death.

  • Anne Carson Quote #21

    Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

  • Anne Carson Quote #22

    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 in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

  • Anne Carson Quote #23

    Now every mortal has pain
    and 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 the earth--
    we call it life. We know no other.
    The underworld's a blank
    and all the rest just fantasy.

  • Anne Carson Quote #24

    On the Rules of Perspective
    A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.

  • Anne Carson Quote #25

    Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

  • Anne Carson Quote #26

    Pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire.

  • Anne Carson Quote #27

    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 luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

  • Anne Carson Quote #28

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

  • Anne Carson Quote #29

    She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

  • Anne Carson Quote #30

    Small, red, and upright he waited,
    gripping his new bookbag tight
    in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
    while the first snows of winter
    floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
    all trace of the world.

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