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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Something
Survived
Carry
Asking
Realize
Fashion
Realizing
Must
Carries
Thing
Carrie

More quotes by Anne Carson

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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
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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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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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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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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Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
Anne Carson
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no 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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Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.
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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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
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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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.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
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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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
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I was more worn out with the Odyssey than it was with the Iliad. I mean, just comparing those two - you can see how it's changing, how the language of the Iliad is somehow monstrously new - and that language of the Odyssey is more comfortable, even for us.
Anne Carson
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What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
Anne Carson