Quote

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

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
Really
Greek
Way
Push
Always
English
Aeschylus
Think
Towards
Density
Thinking
Poet
Attracts
Use
Imitate
Trying
Poets
Something
Metaphor

More quotes by Anne Carson

Image
Desire is no light thing.
Anne Carson
Image
Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
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
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
Image
Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.
Anne Carson
Image
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
Anne Carson
Image
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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
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
Image
It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
Anne Carson
Image
Under the seams runs the pain.
Anne Carson
Image
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
Image
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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
Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
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
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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
What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
Anne Carson
Image
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson