Anne Carson Quotes

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?

It is
to master death.

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

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.

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

[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!

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.

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

You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing.

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

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

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