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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Must
Totally
Would
Pressure
Loved
Seller
Audience
Homer
Sound
Sellers
Felt
Epic
Best
Previous
Come
Poem
More quotes by Anne Carson
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life.
Anne Carson
What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
Anne Carson
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
One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.
Anne Carson
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
He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
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
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
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
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
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.
Anne Carson
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
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
Anne Carson
What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
Anne Carson
Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.
Anne Carson
M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more
Anne Carson
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
We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.
Anne Carson
