Quotes by Anne Carson

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.

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

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.Theres no one alivewho 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!You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. Im surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.Were all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, theres no such thing as life,

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

Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,its 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 underworlds a blankand all the rest just fantasy.

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 Im not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. Youre like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk (On Defloration) which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

[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.

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...

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

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 what is lacking in the actual.

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

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

Kreon: here are Kreons verbs for todayAdjudicateLegislateScandalizeCapitalizehere are Kreons nounsMenReasonTreasonDeathShip of StateMineChorus: mine isnt a nounKreon: it is if you capitalize it

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

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 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.

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.