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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Tea
Poem
Attractive
Page
Pages
Less
Stains

More quotes by Anne Carson

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I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.
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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Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.
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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Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.
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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Under the seams runs the pain.
Anne Carson
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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
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 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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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 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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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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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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Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
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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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