"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."
— Anne Carson (Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides)

"Under the seams runs the pain."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.
He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.
I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"When I desire you a part of me is gone..."
— Anne Carson

"Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing."
— Anne Carson

"Desire is no light thing."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"[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

"I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is."
— Anne Carson

"You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying."
— Anne Carson (Plainwater: Essays and Poetry)

"A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
"
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"Lava bread makes you passionate."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"[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 (Short Talks)

"Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women."
— Anne Carson

"Under the seams runs the pain."
— Anne Carson

"When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain. "
— Anne Carson

"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
— Anne Carson

"Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"All myth is an enriched pattern,
a two-faced proposition,
allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.
Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars.
And from the true lies of poetry
trickled out a question.

What really connects words and things?"
— Anne Carson (The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos)