Quote

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

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
Bounce
Words

More quotes by Anne Carson

Image
We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.
Anne Carson
Image
Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
Anne Carson
Image
M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.
Anne Carson
Image
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
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
Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.
Anne Carson
Image
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
Image
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
Image
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
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
When I desire you a part of me is gone.
Anne Carson
Image
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
Image
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, where can I put it down?
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