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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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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.
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There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.
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It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
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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.
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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
Anne Carson
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No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.
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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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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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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
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Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.
Anne Carson
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Consider incompleteness as a verb.
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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.
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Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan
Anne Carson
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The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
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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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You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
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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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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I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-
Anne Carson
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Caught between the tongue and the taste.
Anne Carson