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The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

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
Science
Edges
Form
Arise
Self
Forms
Behinds
Behind
Leave
Effort
Arises
Desire
Edge

More quotes by Anne Carson

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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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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
Anne Carson
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We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson
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Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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There is no person without a world.
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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Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.
Anne Carson
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Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Anne Carson
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It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.
Anne Carson
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At least half of your mind is always thinking, I'll be leaving this won't last. It's a good Buddhist attitude. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I'm just sad.
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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I never really got over the fun of making letters.
Anne Carson
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Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
Anne Carson