Quote

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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Way
Stop
Men
Seeing
Think
Almost
Discharged
Thinking
Language
Substitute
Like
Desire
Substitutes
Money
Sexual
Nothing
Sex
Sometimes
Activity

More quotes by Anne Carson

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I don't read reviews and I don't know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
Anne Carson
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You used to say. Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness. Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.
Anne Carson
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Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
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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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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Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
Anne Carson
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I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-
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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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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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
Anne Carson
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The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
Anne Carson
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THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Anne Carson
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I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.
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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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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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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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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