Quote

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

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
Impose
Abstraction
Motion
Meaning
Upon
Anything
Made
Time

More quotes by Anne Carson

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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
Anne Carson
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The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
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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Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.
Anne Carson
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The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
Anne Carson
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What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
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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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
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Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.
Anne Carson
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All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Anne Carson
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson
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THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Anne Carson
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There is no person without a world.
Anne Carson
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You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
Anne Carson
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Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
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Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.
Anne Carson
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I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-
Anne Carson