Antigonick Quotes

“Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil
but if some god shakes your house
ruin arrives
ruin does not leave
it comes tolling over the generations
it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor
and all your thrashed coasts groan”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.
Ismene: Who said that?
Antigone: Hegel.
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett.
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel.
Ismene: I don't think so.”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I
not at home with the dead nor with the living”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem
from the last years of her life that begins
"I lose my screams"
dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator
to forbid that you should ever lose your screams”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent
finding an analogy
locating a prior example
so as to be able to say
this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is
not unique you know it happened before
or something much like it
we’re not at a loss how to think about this
we’re not without guidance
there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case
and file it away under
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
now I could dig up those case histories
tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the sons of Phineus
people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind
it wouldn’t help you
it doesn’t help me
it’s Friday afternoon
there goes Antigone to be buried alive”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“You are a person in love with the impossible”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“to carry one's own door will make a person
clumsy, tired and strange
on the other hand, it may come in useful
if you go places that don't have an obvious way in, like normality
or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“all the tall mad mountains of her mind”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for today
Adjudicate
Legislate
Scandalize
Capitalize
here are Kreon's nouns
Men
Reason
Treason
Death
Ship of State
Mine
Chorus: "mine" isn't a noun
Kreon: it is if you capitalize it”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“when joy betrays you
I do not count your life alive
a corpse is more alive
be as rich as you like be absolute
if your joy goes
I wouldn't buy you for a shadow of smoke”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick