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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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
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Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.
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There is no person without a world.
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A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
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Lava bread makes you passionate.
Anne Carson
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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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I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.
Anne Carson
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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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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He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
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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If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
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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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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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
Anne Carson
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M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
Anne Carson
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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
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