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One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

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
Principle
Demand
Principles
Quality
Therapy
Pain
Injury
Demands
Qualities
Explanation

More quotes by Anne Carson

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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
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Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.
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He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
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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?
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Desire is no light thing.
Anne Carson
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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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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
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?
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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.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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Up against another human being one's own procedures take on definition
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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Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.
Anne Carson
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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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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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Under the seams runs the pain.
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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Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
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Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson