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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

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
Doubled
Madness
Desire
Love

More quotes by 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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To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
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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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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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?
Anne Carson
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There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.
Anne Carson
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Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
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he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean
Anne Carson
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
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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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 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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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
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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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.
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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Existence will not stop until it gets to beauty.
Anne Carson
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We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
Anne Carson
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At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.
Anne Carson