Anne Carson Quotes

“There is no person without a world.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“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.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Do I not live? Badly, I know, but I live.”
― Sophocles, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

“If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it".”
― Anne Carson

“Note that the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.”
― Anne Carson, Nox

“He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [...] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Sublime natures are seldom clean!”
― Longinus, Longinus: On the Sublime

“People really understand very little of one another. Sometimes when I speak to him, my Cid looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something (a city on a map?) like someone who has tumbled off a star. But he's not the one who feels alien—ever, I think. He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart. Like Sokrates he fails to understand why travel should be such a challenge to the muscles of the heart, for other people. Around every bend of the road is a city of gold, isn't it?
I am the kind of person who thinks no, probably not. And we walk, side by side, in different countries.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“No I do not like blaming. Because for me it's enough
if someone is other than bad—not too much out of hand,
conscious at least of the justice that helps the city,
a healthy man. No I shall not
lay blame. Because fools
are a species that never ends.
All things, you know, are beautiful with which
ugly things are not mixed.”
― Simonides of Ceos

“It jars me. I remain in control but groping, grappling, wrestling with how to think of it. Here's one way. All those years, all those Labours, I'm living a completely socialist existence. The Labours have to be done and that is that. The Labours tell me when to go to bed, what to eat, what to wear, who to kill and what next. Then I come up from hell, Labours done and they say, Magic! Two o'clock today you are a capitalist! Figure it out! I find no assistance only degradation. I know no rules. I am assigned a therapist who tells me I'm fine. I watch myself become debased, hateful, resentful, mean, I yell all the time. You think psychopathy has nothing to do with the capitalist system? You're wrong. Capitalism farts cruelty like gas from a lawnmower.”
― Anne Carson, H of H Playbook

“[Ibykos fr. 286 translated using only words
from p. 47 of Endgame by Samuel Beckett]

In your kitchen, on the one hand,
bright corpses
starting to stink of having an idea,
where one of my legs [is]
and beneath sooner or later
the whole universe
doesn't ring and won't work.
On the other hand, I shouldn't think so.
Nay Rather,
like a speck in the void,
pacing to and fro,
accompanied by the alarm,
frankly,
angrily,
impatiently,
not very convinced,
[it] kisses me goodbye. I'm dead. (Pause).”
― Anne Carson

“XIII. HERAKLES' KILLING CLUB
Little red dog did not see it he felt it
All events carry but one”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red