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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Drama
Hearts
Across
Song
Pounded
Music
Valve
Self
Meanwhile
Heart
Desperate
Every
Opening

More quotes by Anne Carson

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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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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
Anne Carson
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The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
Anne Carson
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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
Anne Carson
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What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
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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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.
Anne Carson
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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
Anne Carson
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There is no person without a world.
Anne Carson
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Caught between the tongue and the taste.
Anne Carson
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Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.
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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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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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
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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When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
Anne Carson
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Anne Carson
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It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Anne Carson
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The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
Anne Carson
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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
Anne Carson