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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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Anne Carson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: June 21
Linguist
Literary Critic
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
City of Toronto
Carson
Anne
Compare
Somehow
Changing
Comfortable
Monstrously
Language
Iliad
Two
Odyssey
Mean
Comparing
Even
Worn

More quotes by Anne Carson

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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
Anne Carson
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Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
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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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
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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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Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
Anne Carson
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A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains.
Anne Carson
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Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.
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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A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Anne Carson
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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.
Anne Carson
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Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.
Anne Carson
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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
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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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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
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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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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