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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
Two
Odyssey
Mean
Comparing
Even
Worn
Compare
Somehow
Changing
Comfortable
Monstrously
Language
Iliad

More quotes by Anne Carson

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Life pulls softly inside your bindings. The pod glows - dear stench.
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Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
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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.
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Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.
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It is for God to fix the time who knows no time.
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Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
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The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
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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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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Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.
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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I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented... I feel I am blundering in concepts too fine for me.
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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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
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A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.
Anne Carson
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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
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What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
Anne Carson
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What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.
Anne Carson
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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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Philosophy - hopeless. Yet it gives me hope.
Anne Carson