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
Hate
Poles
Energy
Axes
Human
Energies
Humans
Paradox
Love
Motive
Absence
Presence
Axis
Desire
Poised

More quotes by Anne Carson

Image
The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
Anne Carson
Image
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
I don't know that we really think any thoughts we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.
Anne Carson
Image
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
Anne Carson
Image
Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Anne Carson
Image
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
Anne Carson
Image
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
Image
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
Anne Carson
Image
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
Anne Carson
Image
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
Image
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson