Quote

We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

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
Human
Attempt
Humans
Starting
Mean
Struggle
Mush
Every
Talking
Syntax
Kind
Language
Accuracy
Means
Grammar
Sense
Drag
Thought
Unconscious

More quotes by 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 was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
Anne Carson
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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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To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Anne Carson
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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
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Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.
Anne Carson
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They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Anne Carson
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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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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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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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
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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
Anne Carson
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Making is always a slightly hopeful thing because once you've made something, it'll - the world will be different.
Anne Carson
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You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
Anne Carson
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
Anne Carson
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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.
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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We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
Anne Carson
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Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
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Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan
Anne Carson