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
Two
Eros
Mean
Match
Writing
Perfectly
Never
Exactly
Love
Read
People
Words
Desire
Write

More quotes by Anne Carson

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I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.
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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Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
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No one will ever make necessity not happen.
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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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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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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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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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
Anne Carson
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Lava bread makes you passionate.
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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Under the seams runs the pain.
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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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
Anne Carson
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No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.
Anne Carson
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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
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