Quotes by Anne Carson

To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.

DEATH. . .And now you are here to fight for this woman.You know her promise is given.She has to die or her husband wont go free.APOLLORelax, Im not breaking any laws.DEATHWhy the bow, if youre breaking no laws?APOLLOI always carry a bow, its my trademark.

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.

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

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.

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

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.

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Some conversations are not about what theyre about.

So muchhuman cruelty is simplyincidental is simplybrainless. Simply nocommon sense. You couldtake the entirety of thecommon sense of humansand put it in the palm ofyour hand and still haveroom for your dick.

“[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.”

“Beauty makes me hopeless. I dont care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”

“[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!”

“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...”

“My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.”