Quote

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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Mean
Match
Writing
Perfectly
Never
Exactly
Love
Read
People
Words
Desire
Write
Two
Eros

More quotes by Anne Carson

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I never had much education in English poetry as such.
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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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
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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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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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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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
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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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Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
Anne Carson
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You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
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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What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
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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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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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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Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.
Anne Carson