Quote

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Anne Carson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Presence
Axis
Desire
Poised
Hate
Poles
Energy
Axes
Human
Energies
Humans
Paradox
Love
Motive
Absence

More quotes by Anne Carson

Image
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
Image
Lava bread makes you passionate.
Anne Carson
Image
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.
Anne Carson
Image
If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
Under the seams runs the pain.
Anne Carson
Image
Desire is no light thing.
Anne Carson
Image
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
DEATH . . . And now you are here to fight for this woman. You know her promise is given. She has to die or her husband won't go free. APOLLO Relax, I'm not breaking any laws. DEATH Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws? APOLLO I always carry a bow, it's my trademark.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Anne Carson
Image
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
Image
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
Anne Carson
Image
There is no person without a world.
Anne Carson
Image
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson
Image
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
Image
They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Anne Carson
Image
Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.
Anne Carson
Image
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
Anne Carson