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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Affair
Suddenly
Blacken
Begin
Midway
Youth
Seduced
Thinking
Verse
Verses
Immortal
Central

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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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
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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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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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
Anne Carson
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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
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
Anne Carson
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Lava bread makes you passionate.
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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Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
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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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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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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.
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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What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.
Anne Carson
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He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
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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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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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson