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

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

More quotes by 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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Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt - less and less sharp and biting into you.
Anne Carson
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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
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I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented... I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
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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
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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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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
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The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.
Anne Carson
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson
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Desire is no light thing.
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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
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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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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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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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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
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When they made love Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down from the base of the neck to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.
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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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson