Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Audience
Homer
Sound
Sellers
Felt
Epic
Best
Previous
Come
Poem
Must
Totally
Would
Pressure
Loved
Seller

More quotes by Anne Carson

Image
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
Anne Carson
Image
The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.
Anne Carson
Image
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
You used to say. Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness. Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.
Anne Carson
Image
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
Anne Carson
Image
When I desire you a part of me is gone.
Anne Carson
Image
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light.
Anne Carson
Image
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
Anne Carson
Image
What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.
Anne Carson
Image
Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
Anne Carson
Image
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
Anne Carson
Image
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
Anne Carson
Image
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
Image
I never really got over the fun of making letters.
Anne Carson
Image
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Anne Carson
Image
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.
Anne Carson
Image
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Anne Carson