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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Recently
Onto
Hold
Mother
Remember
Much

More quotes by 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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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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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You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
Anne Carson
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To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
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Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
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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
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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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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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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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When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.
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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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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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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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
Anne Carson
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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
Anne Carson