Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Hot
Spherical
Gun
Changeless
Stars
Imperishable
Perfect
Snap
Power
Snaps
Problem
Flags
Timeless
Named
Uncreated

More quotes by Anne Carson

Image
DEATH . . . And now you are here to fight for this woman. You know her promise is given. She has to die or her husband won't go free. APOLLO Relax, I'm not breaking any laws. DEATH Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws? APOLLO I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson
Image
I never really got over the fun of making letters.
Anne Carson
Image
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
Image
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
Lava bread makes you passionate.
Anne Carson
Image
I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.
Anne Carson
Image
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Anne Carson
Image
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
Anne Carson
Image
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Anne Carson
Image
Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan
Anne Carson