Quotes by Anne Carson

About Anne Carson:

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980-1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow. and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean. Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

Anne Carson

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

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 the story and reach into the text after the object...

Anne Carson

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

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identica...

Anne Carson

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 alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can...

Anne Carson

DEATH . . . And now you are here to fight for this woman. You know her promise is given. She has to die or her husband won't go free. APOLLO Relax, I'm not breaking any laws. DEATH Why the bow, if you're breaking no laws? APOLLO I always carry a bow,...

Anne Carson

I will not stop singing the Muses who set me dancing.

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. T...

Anne Carson

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

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

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Anne Carson

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cu...

Anne Carson

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil but if some god shakes your house ruin arrives ruin does not leave it comes tolling over the generations it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor and all your thrashed coasts groan

Anne Carson

... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The jacket shifted. Geryon peered out.

Anne Carson

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

Anne Carson

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

Anne Carson

But when justice is done the world drops away.

Anne Carson

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

Anne Carson

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

Anne Carson

Author Bio

  • NameAnne Carson
  • DescriptionCanadian poet
  • BornJune 21, 1950
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionLinguist; Poet; Author; Translator
  • WorksAutobiography Of Red
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Member Of The Order Of Canada