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Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Anne Carson

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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Doe
Rage
Tragedy
Grief
Exist
Full

More quotes by Anne Carson

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Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
Anne Carson
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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
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Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
Anne Carson
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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
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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
Anne Carson
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What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
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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
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The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.
Anne Carson
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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
Anne Carson
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A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
Anne Carson
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I was more worn out with the Odyssey than it was with the Iliad. I mean, just comparing those two - you can see how it's changing, how the language of the Iliad is somehow monstrously new - and that language of the Odyssey is more comfortable, even for us.
Anne Carson
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Caught between the tongue and the taste.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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Under the seams runs the pain.
Anne Carson
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Anne Carson
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We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
Anne Carson
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What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
Anne Carson
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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
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To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
Anne Carson