Autobiography of Red Quotes

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Desire is no light thing.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Under the seams runs the pain.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
― 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

“They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
All language can register is the slow return
to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
and habit blurs perception and language
takes up its routine flourishes.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”
― 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

“Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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

“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“...And tonight—Geryon? You okay?
Yes fine, I'm listening. Tonight—?
Why do you have your jacket over your head?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Can't hear you Geryon. The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out. I said sometimes
I need a little privacy.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“...there it was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“…..in that blurred state between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. Like the terrestial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“And now time is rushing towards them
 
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,
 
night at their back.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Four of the roses were on fire.
They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies
from the back of their fused throats.
- XXVII. MITWELT”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Geryon was a monster everything about him was red”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“It was the hour when snow goes blue
and streetlights come on and a hare may
pause on the tree line as still as a word in a book.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red