Anne Carson Quotes

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is somethin...

The basic rules of male-female relationswere imparted atmospherically in our family,no direct speech allowed.

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence. Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches. ... Geryon was going into the Bus Depot one Friday night about three a.m. to ge...

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Banal sexism aside,I find myself temptedto read as one thick stacked act of revengefor all that life withheld from Emily.But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.As if anger could be a kin...

I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.

My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.I open mine as wide as possible.I like to see everything, I say.What’s there to see?Moon. Air. Sunrise.All that light on y...

Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

I walk and walk with cold hands.Back at the house it is filled with longing,nothing to carry longing away.I look back over my life.I try to find analogies.There are none.I have longed for people befor...

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover isto watch the year repeat its days.It is as if I could dip my hand downinto time and scoop upblue and green lozenges of April heata year ago in another...

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say j...

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Ou...

He felt Herakles' hand move on his thigh and Geryon's head went back like a poppy in a breeze

To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.

Do you have change for a dollar? Geryon heard Geryon say. No. Herakles stared straight at Geryon. But I'll give you a quarter for free. Why would you do that? I believe in being gracious. Some hours l...

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,...

To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?' asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virginia Woolf Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of aut...

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in...

Small, red, and upright he waited,gripping his new bookbag tightin one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,while the first snows of winterfloated down on his eyelashe...

Note that the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing...