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We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.

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
Participate
Creation
World

More quotes by 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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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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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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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Anne Carson
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THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM [all snap flags] Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Anne Carson
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I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-
Anne Carson
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What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
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I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.
Anne Carson
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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
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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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
Anne Carson
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Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
Anne Carson
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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
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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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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
Anne Carson
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What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.
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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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
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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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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
Anne Carson