Top 10 Most Famous Anne Carson Quotes
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
— Anne Carson
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
— Anne Carson
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
— Anne Carson
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
— Anne Carson
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
— Anne Carson
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
— Anne Carson
If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
— Anne Carson
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
— Anne Carson
When I desire you a part of me is gone…
— Anne Carson
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
— Anne Carson
Best Anne Carson Quotes About Life
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
— Anne Carson
It would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night, without the terrible sex price to pay.
— Anne Carson
Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
— Anne Carson
Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.
— Anne Carson
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
— Anne Carson
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
— Anne Carson
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
— Anne Carson
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
— Anne Carson
To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.
— Anne Carson
Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.
— Anne Carson
Best Anne Carson Quotes
There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem who’s lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it’s also true of me as me.
— Anne Carson
I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don’t gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
— Anne Carson
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
We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
— Anne Carson
We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.
— Anne Carson
I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented… I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
— Anne Carson
Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.
— Anne Carson
When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.
— Anne Carson
I never had much education in English poetry as such.
— Anne Carson
There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don’t think I can imitate it, but there’s a density to it that I think I’m always trying to push towards in English.
— Anne Carson
I don’t read reviews and I don’t know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.
— Anne Carson
I don’t know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That’s where the mind moves, that’s what’s new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people’s heads for a long time.
— Anne Carson
I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they’re both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that’s almost happening, never quite totally happening.
— Anne Carson
I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.
— Anne Carson
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
— Anne Carson
Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
— Anne Carson
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
— Anne Carson
‘You remember too much,’ my mother said to me recently. ‘Why hold onto all that?’ And I said, ‘where can I put it down?’
— Anne Carson
Under the seams runs the pain.
— Anne Carson
When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
— Anne Carson
Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
— Anne Carson
Repression speaks about sex better than any other form of discourse or so the modern experts maintain. How do people get power over one another? is an algebraic question.
— Anne Carson
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.
— Anne Carson
