Quote

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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Mind
Littles
Dark
Switch
Persons
Word
Flood
Unrepentant
Back
Turns
Translate
Prowling
Person
Words
Expecting
Shivering
Little
Bigs
Page
Barking
Human
Use
Main
Hangs
Humans
History
Pages
Meanings
Trying
Light
Turn
Luminous

More quotes by Anne Carson

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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
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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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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 never really got over the fun of making letters.
Anne Carson
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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
Anne Carson
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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
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Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
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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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
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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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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I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented... I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
Anne Carson
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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
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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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Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.
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He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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You used to say. Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness. Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.
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