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

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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
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I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.
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You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, where can I put it down?
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Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
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To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
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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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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.
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You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
Anne Carson