Quote

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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Black
Lovers
Amid
Beautiful
Train
Lover
Persons
Paint
Planes
Person
Singing
Innocence
Like
Behinds
Beloved
Behind
Mad
Brutalizes
Animal
Teeth
Enrages
History
Shining
Helen

More quotes by Anne Carson

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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
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All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
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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
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We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
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At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.
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Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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I don't read reviews and I don't know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.
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It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
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I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.
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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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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.
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
Anne Carson
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Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.
Anne Carson