Quote

Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

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
Mind
Hope
Stability
Would
Moving
Moves
Breathlessly
Understand
Catch
Impertinent
Living
Delight
Vertigo
Running
Reach
Spins
Moments
Beauty
Suspended
Need
Possible
Arrived
Needs
Moment
Delightful

More quotes by Anne Carson

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I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.
Anne Carson
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Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson
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It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
Anne Carson
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he stood against the wind and let it peel him clean
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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Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
Anne Carson
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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.
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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Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
Anne Carson
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I don't know that we really think any thoughts we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.
Anne Carson
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Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
Anne Carson
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
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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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
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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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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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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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