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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Poverty
Behinds
Behind
Dares
Leave
Ecstatic
Question
Enter
Answers
Dare
Self
Answer
Love
Asked

More quotes by 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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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. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
Anne Carson
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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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The beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
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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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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Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson
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Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.
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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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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My religion makes no sense and does not help me therefore I pursue it.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
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Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
Anne Carson
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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.
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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You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, where can I put it down?
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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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
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We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
Anne Carson